As students in Northern Virginia settle back into classrooms — and face the disruption of coronavirus quarantines — school officials are swiftly adjusting the rules of brick-and-mortar instruction to keep pace with the ongoing pandemic.
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Administrators are fleshing out quarantine instruction plans, adding virus testing and vaccine mandates for students and staff alike, and considering how to deliver shots to families, including to young children, should federal health agencies approve a vaccine for those under 12. These measures come as Virginia hits a major educational landmark: All 132 school divisions are now offering full-time, in-person learning, Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced this week.
“I am proud,” Northam said in a statement Thursday, that “Virginia’s children are now safely back in school.”
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But what school looks like, and what it entails, keeps changing. This week, officials with Fairfax County Public Schools — whose approximately 180,000 students make it the largest district in Virginia — announced that quarantining students will receive live-streamed instruction, where before they worked mostly on take-home assignments. On Thursday, Fairfax’s school board also proposed that Superintendent Scott Brabrand start planning for mass distribution of “children’s vaccines” in the county.
In neighboring Loudoun County Public Schools, which enrolls about 81,000, administrators said they are shrinking the required quarantine time for students exposed to the coronavirus from 14 days to 10.
And in Alexandria City Public Schools, a district of 16,000 across the river from the nation’s capital, the board voted unanimously Thursday to require that students participating in winter or spring sports this academic year must provide proof of vaccination to compete or train. Alexandria follows in the footsteps of Loudoun, Fairfax and Arlington Public Schools, which already adopted such mandates for student-athletes.
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The board also voted unanimously to require that Alexandria staffers must submit documentation proving they are fully vaccinated by Nov. 15. Staffers who fail to do so may be put on leave without pay or fired. Exemptions will be offered only to employees who “satisfactorily” demonstrate they cannot receive the vaccine for medical or religious reasons, and these staffers will have to participate in weekly testing.
The mandate will affect several hundred holdouts. As of Thursday, 2,225 Alexandria staffers are fully vaccinated, while just 362 are not vaccinated and are undergoing weekly testing, officials said. Of these, 15 are administrators, 138 are licensed as teachers and 209 are support staffers, who perform tasks such as bus driving, meal delivery and cleaning.
The rule may be tough to swallow for some. During public comment Thursday, one woman who said she was an Alexandria schools employee urged the board not to require vaccines for staff, complaining in part that developers of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines used cell lines from aborted fetal tissue to test whether the shots worked.
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Early in the evening, board member Christopher A. Suarez, who has emerged as a strong advocate for mandatory vaccination, asked the superintendent whether Alexandria would eventually consider issuing a vaccine requirement for all students older than 12, and not just student-athletes.
Hutchings and his staff said it is important to target student-athletes in particular because national data from the past year and a half show that athletic teams and events often contribute to outbreaks of disease. Besides, students already are vaccinated at high levels in Alexandria City, said Julie Crawford, chief of student services and equity.
Suarez was not convinced. “I do think we need to continue to have the conversation about all students,” he said.
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Crawford said the school system soon will have its own data on student vaccination rates. School officials are sending a survey to families of students 12 and older to ask whether their child is already vaccinated and, if not, to see whether their child would be interested in receiving the shot at school, Crawford said. Alexandria is developing a plan to transport students 12 and older to receive vaccinations, probably starting in early October, she said.
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In Loudoun County, meanwhile, Superintendent Scott A. Ziegler announced last week that he was lowering the quarantine period for unvaccinated or partly vaccinated students exposed to the virus from two weeks to 10 days. Ziegler attributed the decision in part to the “extremely low number of student cases” Loudoun has seen since reopening for in-person learning for the vast majority of students on Aug. 26.
As of Sept. 17, Loudoun had seen 69 cases of the virus among students and had sent 259 into quarantine for possible exposure.
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“For a lot of children and their families, quarantining for 14 days is a hardship, economically and in regard to their mental health,” Ziegler said in a statement.
Speaking at a board meeting Tuesday, he added that Loudoun could eventually shift to requiring only seven days of quarantine, provided the student tests negative for the virus after the fifth day.
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In Fairfax, officials on Tuesday debuted a new program of virtual video instruction for children who must isolate because they contracted the coronavirus or were exposed to the virus. The initiative, which Fairfax is calling “StreamIn/CheckIN,” will permit students to watch their classes online, although teachers can choose whether to stream live or record and post the video later.
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Remote students will be able to watch and listen, but their camera and audio will stay off, Fairfax officials said. This setup is meant to avoid forcing teachers to pursue the concurrent instruction model, which requires educators to engage with online and in-person learners simultaneously and which many teachers found severely taxing during the pandemic.
Isolating students will be able to access their class assignments through the learning platform Schoology, and they will attend check-ins every other day with teachers to receive academic and social-emotional support. Quarantine education will look different for different grade levels: Elementary-school students will be able to watch videos only of their language arts and math classes, while middle- and high-schoolers will be able to stream every class except for physical education.
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The StreamIn/CheckIN program will launch Sept. 27, officials said. It will kick in for every isolating student by no later than the third day of their quarantine.
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On Thursday, Fairfax school board member Melanie K. Meren suggested that Brabrand, the superintendent, should convene a group of “community stakeholders” to start figuring out how to deliver vaccines to children in the county. The board will vote on her suggestion at its next meeting.
The proposal comes shortly after the drug companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced that a lower dose of their vaccines was safe for children as young as 5, and triggered a robust immune response in this population. Although the companies still have to submit their data to the Food and Drug Administration, which they are hoping to do by the end of the month, the finding marks a key step toward the vaccination of younger school-age children.