Trump Quashes CDC Guidelines on Returning to Work & School

The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) recently came out with a set of guidelines for gradually phasing in a return to work and school. The Trump Administration quashed the document and said it would never see the light of day. Fortunately, it has been leaked, and you can read it here. Unfortunately, many of the guidelines will probably never be enacted, let alone enforced. This is partly because the document has been suppressed, and partly because many of the recommendations would be impossible for schools and workplaces to enact. Consequently, it must be concluded that it is not safe to reopen schools for in-person learning (and many other workplaces) and will not be safe to do so until the pandemic is over.

One of the recommendations is that when children return to school, social mixing should be reduced as much as possible. That means the same group of kids and adults remains together throughout the day. Rather than eating in the cafeteria, they remain in their classroom to eat. Rather than having several periods a day, as is the norm in most secondary classrooms, the same group of students should remain in the same classroom all day. Doing this reduces the number of different social contacts children and adults would have each day and, consequently, the potential for infection. It would also allow custodians to disinfect classrooms in between periods, which would not be possible under a typical bell schedule, with students changing classrooms every 45-55 minutes in dozens of rooms per school site.

However, none of the proposals for reopening the schools that I have seen suggest anything like this. They propose sending kids to school twice a week, and staying home the other 3 days. Secondary teachers typically teach 5 different classes per day. If the CDC recommendation was followed, that could have students attending school 5 days per week, each day attending a different period. For example, students who have English 1^st period would spend the entire day with their 1^st period teacher and do a week’s worth of lessons in that one day.

The problem is that this does not take into account social distancing, which is also recommended by the CDC. Students should not sit within six feet of anyone else. If only 10 students are possible per classroom to ensure six feet of space between them, that would mean that one-third, or fewer, of the students in a typical California classroom would be able to attend at any one time. This, in turn, would have students attending each class once every three weeks.

Another challenge for schools is arrival and departure. Typically, these times of the day create traffic and pedestrian bottlenecks, as hundreds of students attempt to get to class on time. The CDC’s recommendation is to stagger drop off and pick up times, which further complicates how to schedule classes. Although this could be achieved by scheduling student drop off and pick up by teacher (since they’d be staying with the same teacher all day) and staggering each teacher’s start time. Of course, this works much more easily in the K-5 grades, where students are already remaining with the same teacher all day.

Another recommendation is that students do not share anything, including electronic devices. That means every student would have to be provided their own laptop or chromebook. As it currently stands, schools that are fortunate enough to have a technology budget, are lucky if they have a class set for each classroom. Most do not. But even for those schools that do, that means potentially 5 or more students typically handling the same computer keyboard, spreading germs along the way. So, schools would have to come up with the funding to quintuple (or more than quintuple) their current computer stockpiles.

The CDC recommends daily health screenings for students and staff, including temperature checks. Doing this has clear and obvious benefits in reducing the risk of disease transmission. It could also add hours to everyone’s work/school day. While the screening might only take a few minutes per person, it could take an hour or more before all of a teacher’s students were screened and ready to enter their classroom.

Whenever a student or staff member displays signs of Covid-19 infection, they are to be isolated in a special area of the school that has been set aside for this purpose. Appropriate sites may not exist at all schools, particularly overcrowded ones. Further, any area used by the sick person (e.g., their classroom) should be closed off and not entered for another 24 hours, at which point it must be thoroughly disinfected. This would further reduce available classroom space and potentially the number of children who could attend school. It could even result in the entire school site shutting down for several days, or longer.

Each school site should have a Covid-19 point-person who monitors all absences, looks for trends that may indicate a local outbreak, reports these trends to authorities, ensures that adequate measure are taken when such trends are identified, and responds to staffs concerns about the pandemic. Schools do not have people who are trained to do this. Many schools do not even have a staff member who is free to do this, assuming they were provided training, as all staff members already have too many other responsibilities.

It is recommended that schools have a back-up roster of trained individuals, in case regular staff members get sick. This, of course, is a fantasy. Most school districts do not have a sufficient supply of substitute teachers under normal conditions. Quite often, school districts inform their employees not to take personal days on Mondays and Fridays because of this problem. Fairly often, when a teacher gets sick in the middle of the night, there are no substitutes available the next morning, and their classes must be covered by their colleagues during their prep periods. Furthermore, virtually no substitutes are actually trained as teachers or have credentials that qualify them to teach any subject. So, when too many teachers get sick, classes may end up just being canceled.

Vulnerable workers are supposed to be given duties that minimize their contact with the public. This includes anyone older than 65 (as is the case for many school staff members), and anyone with heart, liver, kidney or lung disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or weakened immune systems. Such workers are to self-identify and employers are not to pry into their medical history. At schools, this could include significant portions of the staff, including teachers and administrators. Obviously, continuing to do Distance Learning at home solves this problem. Indeed, the CDC recommends that employers support their right to telework. But if schools are compelled to reopen for in-person learning, and all vulnerable staff members exercise their right to not be exposed to the public, they will likely have insufficient numbers of staff to actually reopen.

Lastly, and most significantly, the CDC document talks about phases, but does not define what these phases are. More alarmingly, epidemiologists and pandemic experts say that nothing should be reopened until new infection rates have dropped dramatically, which has not happened anywhere in the U.S. University of Washington scientist say the rate of new infections should drop to 1 new case per 1 million residents. They also say that there should be regular, repeated, universal testing, combined with contact tracing and mandatory quarantines before things reopen. Doing this makes it possible to isolate the majority of infectious individuals, significantly reducing the chances of further spread.

However, none of these recommendations are happening anywhere in the country, and they are unlikely to be in place by August-September, when schools typically reopen for their fall semesters. In most communities, neither the funding, nor their technical capacity are in place for this level of testing and tracing, let alone quarantine enforcement. Consequently, if will NOT be safe for children or staff to return to school sites in the fall, even if these other CDC recommendations were implemented.