‘We have to be agile’: School closures rise again as more teachers and students test positive for omicron
First came holiday-season flight cancellations and now come short-term school closures and virtual learning. COVID-19’s omicron variant continues to disrupt American life.
Many school districts across the country, mostly clustered in the northeast, are temporarily switching to remote instruction as students and teachers return from holiday break in the middle of skyrocketing COVID-19 case counts.
That mirrors a move from some employers, including Goldman Sachs
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that are temporarily opting for remote work arrangements, hoping that virtual work will have less impact on productivity than an omicron breakout in the office.
On Sunday, the daily average on cases hit a record more than 405,470, up 204% in two weeks, while hospitalizations rose to more than 93,000, according to a New York Times tracker. That also tops new case records set days earlier.
This week, 2,181 schools have experienced some type of closure or disruption to in-person instruction, according to Burbio.com, a website tracking school opening and closing information.
In the week beginning Dec 19, the count stood at 1,029. The week before that, it was 408. Many districts changing their in-person education plans are opting for one- or two-week remote learning sessions.
“‘It’s the transition, the see-sawing, the back and forth that does cost us time.’”
Other districts are pausing in-person tuition for just a couple of days to give students and staff enough time to get tested. (That might be a challenge, or at least a long wait in some places.)
“It’s the transition, the see-sawing, the back and forth that does cost us time and also the psychological period people have to undergo, including families that need to deal with care-taking responsibilities,” said Tsedal Neeley, a business administration professor at Harvard Business School and senior associate dean of faculty development and research strategy at the school.
Here are some examples from around the country:
• Newark Public Schools will offer remote instruction through Jan. 14. The district is planning on a Jan. 18 return to in-person instruction.
• Detroit Public Schools are not offering in-person or remote instruction through Jan. 5, according to a notice citing an all-time high of a 36% COVID-19 infection rate in the city. School district staff will be required to get tested and students are encouraged to test too, according to the Dec. 31 announcement.
Nikolai Vitti, the district’s superintendent, said parents will have to check back in coming days for the plans on the rest of the week. “We simply cannot go online districtwide Monday, January 3rd because all of our students do not have laptops,” Vitti added.
• One notable exception is New York City, the country’s largest school system. The school system is re-opening for in-person instruction, and the Board of Education says it will give free at-home COVID-19 tests to students or staff showing potential COVID symptoms.
Still, Michael Mulgrew, president of the city’s teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, told Spectrum News NY1 on Monday “our concern is staffing for the next couple of days because we don’t know what’s going to happen today in terms of the number of adults who are going to go to work because we know that this variant is quite pervasive.”
“‘There’s a huge cognitive tax that come from task switching.’”
Dan Markovitz, a workplace productivity consultant, says the upended work and school plans are going to cut into parents’ capacity to get work done if their child is back to virtual school and close enough to distract them.
“There’s certainly ample evidence that there’s a huge cognitive tax that come from task switching,” said Markovitz, founder and president of Markovitz Consulting.
Of course, the pandemic has changed work expectations and technological capacity, Markovitz added. “We are certainly in a better situation, but as animals, productivity machines, we are the same as we were 10,000 years ago,” he said.
One silver lining: The omicron variant is so far appearing to be milder, compared to other forms, at least for people who are vaccinated.
Dogged by the learning losses many students experienced during the pandemic, school administrators currently have to see if there’s enough staff to open classrooms while minimizing the chance for infections during the school day. They also have to factor in the parents who potentially have to re-assess their own work plans if kids have to study remotely.
Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said in-person schooling can be pulled off under the circumstances, at least where his children go to school.
For schools and other types of employers figuring out immediate work plans, an important upcoming test will be how many staffers are testing positive in the coming days, Neeley said.
For example, Cambridge Public Schools in Cambridge, Mass. near Harvard is closed on Monday and Tuesday while students and staff get tested.
Neeley, the author of “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere,” said many people have figured out how to effectively work remotely. So any shifts back to remote work will not cut into productivity so long as households have jobs with an ability to telecommute, plus the technology and Internet access.
“We have built that capability,” she said, acknowledging some lower-income families may not have the same access to those telecommunication services — such as high-speed Wi-Fi — compared to higher-income household,” she said.
But we have to remain light on our feet to navigate the pandemic’s challenges, Neeley said. “The most important lesson is, especially with the surge, we have to be agile, have to adapt and have to be equipped with technology and information.”
