As schools reopen, student coronavirus cases spike

Eighth-graders change classes Thursday in Guntown, Miss., as others wait in their assigned spots against the wall on the first day back at school in the Lee County District.
(AP/The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal/Adam Robison)
Eighth-graders change classes Thursday in Guntown, Miss., as others wait in their assigned spots against the wall on the first day back at school in the Lee County District. (AP/The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal/Adam Robison)

Last week, schools in Corinth, Miss., welcomed back hundreds of students. By Friday, one high-schooler tested positive for the novel coronavirus. By early this week, the count rose to six students and one staff member infected. Now, 116 students have been sent home to quarantine, a spokeswoman for the school district confirmed.

Despite the quick fallout, the district's superintendent said he has no plans to change course.

"Just because you begin to have positive cases, that is not a reason for closing school," Superintendent Lee Childress said in a Facebook Live broadcast on Tuesday on the school district's Facebook page.

As districts around the country debate the merits of in-person classes vs. remote learning amid a pandemic, the Corinth School District's early experience shows how quickly positive tests can lead to larger quarantines.

[CORONAVIRUS: Click here for our complete coverage » arkansasonline.com/coronavirus]

Other districts that have welcomed teachers or students back have faced similar challenges. After teachers returned to plan lessons in Georgia's largest district, 260 district employees were barred from reentering schools because of either testing positive for the coronavirus or being in close contact with someone who had.

In southeast Kansas, six school administrators tested positive after attending a three-day retreat. And within hours of opening, a school in Greenfield, Ind., was informed by the health department that a student had the virus.

Some health officials in the Trump administration, which has pushed for schools to fully reopen, are now urging communities with high rates of the virus to rethink in-person classes. On Sunday, Deborah Birx, the White House's top coronavirus coordinator, said on CNN's "State of the Union" that in hard-hit areas, "we are asking people to distance-learn at this moment, so we can get this epidemic under control."

Mississippi has been among the hardest-hit states in the South and could overtake Florida as the top state for cases per capita, according to researchers at Harvard University. The state has had more than 63,000 coronavirus cases and more than 1,800 deaths to date.

On Tuesday, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said in a Facebook post that he would delay school opening for seventh to 12th grades in hot spots. The governor also mandated masks in schools and ordered a two-week mask requirement for public gatherings.

[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5oWoPmljeQ]

In Corinth, the school district gave families an option of either sending their children to school buildings or doing distance learning from home.

According to the district's reopening plan, students and teachers are screened daily, with their temperatures taken upon arrival at school and checked for symptoms including coughing, difficulty breathing, and loss of taste and smell. Childress said that the district will start midday temperature checks.

When the schools learned of positive coronavirus cases, they used contact tracing and notified students who had been "within 6 feet of an infected person for 15 minutes or more," said a memo posted Wednesday on Facebook informing the community of the cases. Seating charts helped the school determine who needed to quarantine, Childress said in the Facebook Live broadcast.

Those students will have to self-quarantine for 14 days and continue school online.

Despite the positive tests and quarantines, Childress said he remained optimistic about the school district's plans. He encouraged the families to wear masks, and he urged everyone with children in quarantine to stay home until getting their test results.

"We've had a good start of school," Childress said. "We're going to have some more positive cases. We know that. We know it will happen. We're going to have to deal with it, and I can assure that we will deal with it and when we impose quarantines on students and staff, we are doing that for a reason."

CHICAGO GOES VIRTUAL

New York City is the only major U.S. school system still considering in-person classes this fall, after Chicago rebuffed President Donald Trump's calls to reopen to avoid further strain on the U.S. economy.

Chicago Public Schools will begin the academic year with all-virtual learning, the nation's third-largest district announced Wednesday.

New York City officials say they are still on track to open in September with a hybrid of in-class and remote instruction, though they need approval from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has said he will make a final decision this week.

The national rush to all-remote learning will keep parents struggling to work and teach their children simultaneously, businesses navigating those conflicts, and the virus-wracked country that much further away from normality.

"It's a huge blow to the economy, and to the long-term potential for growth," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. "Unfortunately we've put ourselves in a position where it's getting harder to see how we're going to sustain a rebound in the third quarter."

In Chicago alone, the decision affects 355,000 students -- kids whose parents had expected them to be in classrooms starting Sept. 8. Other major school districts that have already opted for virtual instruction for at least the start of the year include Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta and Houston. If New York City joins in, that would affect the families of another 1.1 million students.

LONG-TERM COSTS

North Carolina paused its reopening for five weeks, keeping businesses including bars, movie theaters and bowling alleys closed, and limiting the size of gatherings.

"Other states that lifted restrictions quickly have had to go backward as their hospital capacity ran dangerously low and their cases jumped higher," said Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. "We won't make that mistake in North Carolina."

The economic effects of keeping children out of school go beyond matters of convenience and pocketbook. They also expose imbalances in the economy, with some children unable to access the internet as easily as others.

"The first-order short-term economic impacts will be likely centered around what this does to families needing childcare; loss of school meals for the kids making hunger worse; and whatever furloughing the district is doing," said Diane Schanzenbach, professor at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. "Long term, the costs of all of this lost learning will be with us for decades."

New York City's hybrid plan, which includes schools getting cleaned daily and mandatory masks, has been criticized by state officials, who have described it as more of an outlier. Mayor Bill de Blasio says they will shut down if the city's infection rate exceeds 3% over seven days.

"We are trying to maximize in-person learning for the good of our kids because we know it makes a world of difference," de Blasio said during an Aug. 3 news briefing. "Online is a tool we will use when we need to use it, but it's inherently imperfect.

Information for this article was contributed by Jaclyn Peiser of The Washington Post; and by Leslie Patton of Bloomberg News.

Upcoming Events