With less than two weeks until the start of the academic year, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) remained steadfast Wednesday that nearly all public school children in the nation’s capital would be required to attend in-person school full time for the upcoming academic year and said she is not eyeing any specific coronavirus case number that could bring in-person learning to a halt.
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In May, Bowser pledged that all D.C. children would be required to return to school buildings, unless they had a doctor-approved medical exemption. That was when cases were still declining in the region, and well before the delta variant hit the area with force.
But at a back-to-school news conference Wednesday, the mayor said that the latest virus numbers haven’t shaken her confidence in the safety of in-person learning and that she has no plans to expand eligibility for virtual learning in the fall.
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The mayor warned that residents should expect to see at least some increase in cases as schools reopen and in-person youth activities resume. But she does not anticipate the case count in schools to exceed what the general population is experiencing. If cases reach “a trend of concern,” Bowser said her administration would do what’s “necessary.”
D.C. mayor says all students will be back in the classroom full time in the fall. Can she pull it off?
Last academic year, around a quarter of the city’s public school students partially attended in-person classes, with some of those students learning from a classroom just a few hours a week. This year, the Bowser administration said just 98 of the school system’s 52,000 students have been approved for virtual learning.
“We stated from the outset that, for our city, having in-person learning is a priority, and that is how we continue to approach our response to covid, including a masking requirement — not just for schools — but for indoor settings,” Bowser said. “We don’t have a metric that says we are going to shut down schools.”
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The Bowser administration also laid out Wednesday the safety protocols for school buildings in the fall. Overall, the safety provisions will be less stringent — more students in each classroom, less quarantining — than they were in the previous academic year, though the protocols align with local and federal health guidelines.
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Unvaccinated and vaccinated students and adults will still be required to wear a mask at all times in school buildings — a mandate that has not been controversial in the District. And random testing of students will be conducted weekly.
Anyone in a school building who tests positive for the virus will be required to isolate for at least 10 days. If unvaccinated students and staff are in a classroom with someone who has the virus, they do not have to quarantine if everyone is properly masked. Based on these rules, it is unlikely that an entire class — or large portion of a class — would need to quarantine, which was a common occurrence last academic year.
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If a student is required to quarantine, Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee said that student will probably not receive live virtual lessons. That model, known as simulcasting and frequently used in the past academic year, requires a teacher to instruct in-person and virtual students at the same time from the classroom. Ferebee said the school system would be selective when calling on teachers to simulcast.
“It is a compromising learning experience for some students,” Ferebee said at the news conference. “And we also know that there is time needed to plan for execution. And so we do not want scenarios where we are entering into simulcast instruction for one or two students out of 25 or 30.”
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Ferebee said social distancing is recommended but may not be feasible everywhere as teachers need to fit full rosters in their classrooms. Middle- and high-schoolers can switch classes as normal, mixing with as many different teachers and students as needed for a standard schedule.
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Charter schools, which educate nearly 50 percent of the public school population, can adopt these rules that align with health guidelines or enact stricter ones.
“As each local education agency is independent, implementation of those guidelines vary,” Shannon Hodge — founding executive director of DC Charter School Alliance, the city’s main charter advocacy group — wrote in a statement after Bowser’s news conference.
The more detailed school reopening plan arrives as the delta variant continues to drive an uptick in cases and there is no date set for when young children will become eligible for coronavirus vaccines. Parents say they are anxious about what this will mean for the fate of the academic year, and some have called on the chancellor to allow more children to continue with virtual learning from home.
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“D.C. families have endured a lot in the past 18 months — job losses, hardship, untold stress, loss of family members — in order to protect our children from COVID,” read a letter from a coalition of parents calling on city leaders to give all families the option of virtual learning. “The lack of proper safeguards in the D.C. in-person school reopening plan makes that hardship and those sacrifices worthless.”
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education plans to oversee the asymptomatic, saliva-based school testing program, which will test a random sampling of students each week. The goal is to test 10 to 20 percent of students at each school each week. Students must have consent forms to be tested.
Charters can opt into this program or receive a micro grant to adopt their own. KIPP DC and Friendship — the city’s two largest charter networks — have announced they will test all students and staff each week in a pooled testing model.
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The school system says it will inform families any time a case is detected in their child’s school or classroom.
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Bowser announced earlier this month that all city employees — including school system employees — will need to be vaccinated or tested for the virus weekly. The city is not requiring eligible students to be vaccinated but is hosting vaccination sites where students can receive free AirPods if they get the shots.
The District is struggling to vaccinate all of its eligible children, particularly Black children, who have drastically lower vaccination rates than their White and Hispanic peers.
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