Sunday School Extra Credit 7/12/20

I'm still exhausted from the Sunday School two-fer with Betsy DeVos, but I'm suiting up and going back in for this week's Extra Credit.

To balance things out, I'm focusing on other folks who were in the classrooms yesterday who also had something to say about getting kids back into learning mode.

First up? Adm. Brett Giroir, Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS, who was in the This Week classroom with George Stephanopoulos, who asked first if Giroir agreed with the president that the CDC guidelines on reopening schools are too tough and too expensive.

Giroir thinks the guidelines "are really right on target" and that the entire task force worked on them together, all the medical folks and agency folks, and "we feel they're pretty strong." And, as a pediatrician, he said

We have to do this safely but kids not being in school risk their social and emotional health, risk many people with nutrition, the recognition of child abuse, child sexual abuse, it's really important to get kids physically back in school. But we have to do it safely and the first thing we need to do is, we need to get the virus under control. 

As did DeVos, he pointed to other countries, Sweden, Finland and Japan, as places they're looking to find out how to do this safely, and from them we learned that children don't seem to spread the virus.  He also said

the guidelines aren't changing this week. These are more guidelines that are amenable to school districts actually implementing them - the CDC guidelines tend to be a little more academic and long, these are going to be much more concise so people can really follow them and understand them.

He also noted, tangentially to schools reopening, that "we were hopeful that (the virus) would diminish in the summer, but we didn't count on it. And yes, there's a possibility it could be worse in the fall and we are all continuing to increase everything we do.

...we're going to need tens of millions of more tests a month and we're planning for that, because we have a lot of respiratory viruses like flu circulating. Very critical that people get their flu vaccines because we don't want flu circulating with COVID.

So, I'm guessing we might see some flu vaccine requirements for schools that do reopen, and we know that's going to cause yet another uproar.  So much to look forward to, don't you think?

Next up? Chuck Todd's conversation with Miami-Dade Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on MTP, who was asked about the CDC guidelines being too strict or too costly.

Carvalho said some of them might be costly, but they're using the guidelines to inform how they develop their reopening plan, in conjunction with state and local health departments. He spoke about social distancing specifically, and how they're looking at using "non-traditional spaces, like cafeterias or media centers or gyms" - in effect, making more classrooms.

Carvalho said some of the money to pay for this coming from the CARES Act, but there's going to be need for more. So far, $15B has been made available, but back during the Great Recession, over $113B "had already been invested nationally to protect K-12 institutions.

So, I think that for the purchase of PPEs, additional disinfection cycles, the electrostatic disinfection of schools, alteration of schedules, may need more bus routes to achieve greater social distancing between the riders, more than likely we will need additional resources earmarked specifically for local governments and school systems.

He talked a bit about his multi-option plan, which "relies on a five-day-a-week schooling experience in-person across all of Miami-Dade" but also offers remote teaching and learning opportunities as well as a hybrid model, with one group of kids in school some days and another group in school on alternate days. But, he said,

One of the elements that we keep looking at is... younger children, perhaps students with disabilities, to a certain extent English language learners, you know, some of those that by virtue of age but also by virtue of the greatest possibility for learning loss since last fall need to re-engage quickly in the best possible way of teaching which is face to face with a caring, professional teacher.

I think everyone agrees with him on that, as long as it can be done safely.

Down the hall to the right, Chris Wallace had Dr. Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins, in the Fox News Sunday classroom and the first question was on what Inglesby thought of the presidents push to open schools and his complaint about the guidelines being "too tough, too expensive and too impractical." After saying that it's not "even a matter of debate" that pretty much everyone wants to open schools safely and as soon as possible, he said

I do think there are going to be many challenges to opening schools safely and just kind of asserting that just because they want to open safely doesn't make it so. It's going to be pretty -- pretty difficult for many schools. States around the country have been preparing for this. 

Wallace wondered what we know about the risks of kids getting the virus, and spreading it. Inglesby said "we do know" that kids have a much lower risk than adults, "but not zero," and we have have children die from COVID. It's less clear, he said, "how efficiently kids will spread the virus in school" but he did note

there are examples such as in Israel in the last couple of months, there have been a large -- there was a large outbreak in schools when they reopened. And so, I think there still is uncertainty that we're going to have to live with. We probably won't know all the answers when we started in the fall but we'll have to watch very carefully and react to what we find.

And his thoughts on cutting funding, as the president and DeVos suggest? "Yeah, no."

I think issuing an ultimatum for schools opening is the wrong approach. I think guiding schools and helping schools with financial support and encouraging schools to follow CDC guidance and state health department guidance is the right way to go. I think our incentives are all aligned in the sense that everyone really does want schools to open safely, but mandating it under a very tight timeline such as what happens in Florida this week where they're required to open schools five days a week in 30 days, before the state has really even had a chance to review school plans, seems really like the wrong approach to me.

And, checking in with Margaret Brennan in the Face the Nation classroom, Surgeon General Jerome Adams was also asked about the CDC guidelines and which parts are too tough and too expensive. Adams wants his own school-aged kids back in class, and he noted that the CDC guidelines "talk about best-case scenarios," and gave the example of school lunches. The guidelines say every child should bring their own lunch, but, he said

We know that in some school districts and many school districts, over fifty percent of kids are eating lunch at school and don't have the ability to bring their own lunch. So that's one case where we need to work directly with local school districts and help them figure out, okay, 'if you can't do what is the gold standard, best-case scenario, can you do something that's a compromise to safely reopen?'

He said that's the kind of thing they're talking about with new, "more specific recommendations" that can be looked at by individual school districts. And each district needs their own plan, even though, as Brennan mentioned, lots of people are looking for a national plan.

And finally  we hear from  former FDA head Scott Gottlieb who was asked by Brennan whether we have 'definitive data' that kids don't spread the virus, given DeVos' urging that kids get back in the classroom five days a week.

Well, look, the data isn't definitive, but it's certainly suggestive. And what we've learned from this virus is it has surprised us. It has both- we've both underestimated it and overestimated it at the same time... I think it's important to give discretion to local districts to take steps to try to de-densify schools and protect kids so we don't have outbreaks. Everyone should be working to reopen the schools. It's critical. And when I talked to Republican and Democratic governors, they are, in fact, doing that. But I think districts need discretion to try to put in place measures to keep kids safe.

Gottlieb also said that, other than maybe Sweden, no other countries reopened or kept schools open with so much spread of the virus like we're trying to do here, so "we do face a unique risk." Not only that, but 'less susceptible' doesn't mean 'not susceptible."

And sometimes-- some of the studies show that they (children) can compensate for their decline in susceptibility by their propensity to spread infection, by their behaviors that are more likely to propagate infection.

He mentioned the 2018-2019 flu season, with 11.3 million symptomatic kids and 480 deaths. We haven't seen that with COVID yet, he said, because

 we've largely sheltered the children. And we don't want to see it. We've got to take measures to make sure it doesn't become epidemic in children in the same way that flu becomes epidemic in children because we don't know what the impact's going to be on kids. Right now, the kids have been sheltered...

So - while everyone agrees that the goal is to get kids in school as soon and as safely as possible, no one seems to be chomping at the bit to get things opened back up. Everyone seemed open to some kind of hybrid plan, either out of caution or out of necessity. And, notably, no one was talking about implementing school vouchers.

Stay safe.