COVID-19 Policy Update
MONDAY 8/17
FEDERAL
Phase 4: Speaker Pelosi is bringing House members back in session this coming week to vote on a proposal to block the Trump Administration's plan for overhauling the Postal Service. Post Service funding emerged as one of the flashpoints during Phase 4 negotiations due to the additional funding House Democrats wanted to provide and the increased demand expected due to mail in voting.
FDA: Approved a saliva-based COVID-19 test.
CDC: New report on multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Nationwide, 570 children have been diagnosed with the disease. Ten of those children died and 364 were admitted to the ICU.
STATE
Alabama: More than 30 of 138 school districts are up and running. About half a dozen opened remotely, and the others opened for in-person school. Some have finished a full week. Another 70 open this coming week, most offering in-person classes.
Arizona: J.O. Combs Unified School District had to cancel all classes, including online ones, due to a sick out.
California: Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Austin Beutner wrote their Reopening Schools Safely initiative, which involves UCLA, Stanford, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft, Anthem and HealthNet for an innovative COVID-19 testing and contact tracing program.
Georgia: A 15-year-old Gwinnett County boy has died after contracting COVID-19.
Massachusetts: Your child’s a no-show at virtual school? You may get a call from the state’s foster care agency.
Michigan: Helpful reopening tracker.
New Jersey: Teachers Union urges remote only opening.
New York:
North Carolina:
South Carolina: Governor McMaster said that schools will have enough personal protective equipment to last through the pandemic.
INTERNATIONAL
Israel: The Health Minister said, "If schools open, COVID-19 will crash the health system by December."
UK: The government has launched a campaign to persuade parents that it is safe to return to school. Now we just need to get this boy his second biscuit.
Reopening Schools Around The World: EdWeek article on lessons learned.
Schools in Europe Reopen With Little Debate—but More Masks and Distancing: Good overview of the opening throughout Europe.
- “School closures are only effective if we want to damage our children,” said Wieland Kiess, a professor of pediatrics at the Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development in Germany. He coordinated a study that showed isolation at home is damaging the mental health of children, especially those from poorer families.
- The U.K.’s National Education Union, which represents 450,000 teachers, lecturers and support staff, initially resisted the partial reopening of schools in June but now says it supports a fuller reopening if strict hygiene and social-distancing standards are met.
ECONOMIC RECOVERY
Retail Spending: Retail sales are considered a leading indicator for the overall economic health given that two-thirds of its activity from consumers. Retail sales surpassed pre-pandemic levels in July, rising 1.2% from June. The concern is that this spending was bolstered by the CARES Act funding through direct cash benefits and expanded UI. Retail sales could fall given the loss of additional $600 per week. An NBER paper makes this very case estimating that the loss of expanded UI will result in a 44% decline in local spending.
Direct Cash Benefit: NBER paper that found U.S. households only spent around 40% of their CARES Act direct cash benefit, but many low-income families spent all of their benefit.
LEARNING PODS
Mom Launched a YC-backed Company Is Now Pivoting To Pods: Elizabeth Adams was three months pregnant and had a 6-year-old daughter when she started making weekly trips from Washington, DC, to Silicon Valley to participate in Y Combinator and launch her startup Trustle team initially developed an app that allowed child care experts to connect over video calls with families who wanted support for everyday parenting challenges. Now they're pivoting to offer affordable learning pods for students K-5, and they're reinvesting 80% of the profits into scholarships so low-income students can participate as well.
Silicon Valley Is Jumping on the Microschool Bandwagon: Good article on some of the tech companies that are supporting learning pods.
Durham Public Schools: Will provide 'learning centers' for K-5 students who need supervision in remote learning.
Pandemic Flight: The superintendent of the school system released a letter discouraging families from "podding":
FCCPS has seen a rise in families deciding to leave the system until we are either back in person or there is a vaccine to fight the virus. I respect each family's decision and also want to share some information and thinking. At our recent School Board meeting, I used the term “pandemic flight” in reference to families deciding to homeschool, pod and hire a face-to-face private instructor for homeschooled children, attend private schools, and/or look for other private solutions to make it all work. My family -- two full-time working parents and two school-aged children -- is facing many of the same challenges and empathize with the dilemmas you find yourself in. However, it is important that our community understands that these actions -- that is, disenrolling from FCCPS -- have consequences.
Surge in Demand for Tutors: "They're not happy with the online the school systems are offering, so they want someone to come in and actually sit down and show their child how to do you know a math problem or write a paper or practice reading," said the owner of a TN-based tutoring company.
Working Parents Are Hitting Their Coronavirus Breaking Point: "Parents with school-age children are hiring sitters or paying for online classes they wouldn’t need if their children were in school. Some are lining up tutors or switching to private schools that plan to open for in-person learning. Parents with younger children are bracing for potentially higher charges at their day cares, which are straining to pay for protective gear and additional cleaning."
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RESOURCES
Digitally Disconnected: Long piece via the Washington Post. Several highlights:
- In Mississippi and Arkansas, about 40 percent of students lacked high-speed Internet.
- “It’s going back to the old days where we blocked people from going to schools to be able to learn to read,” said Pedro Martinez, the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas. More than half of families in Martinez’s district do not have high-speed Internet service at home. “It’s like us saying, ‘You can’t come into class. You can’t come to school.’
Equitable Remote Learning Building Blocks: LearnLaunch has a web-based tool and offers workshops and coaching to help schools with their planning for equitable remote teaching and learning.
Parents Remote Little Live Interaction: According to an EdChoice survey, the median time parents reported their children spending on coursework following the switch to virtual learning was 3.5 hours, with a surprising one out of five parents reporting no real-time interactions with a teacher following the switch. This finding tracks with the Census Household Pulse survey data.
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As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost: "Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience."
Football: States wrestle with playing high school football amid COVID.
Historic Laptop Shortage: Due to increased demand and supply chain shortages. More from Engadget.
Bridging Divide: Has never been more important. "Every dollar invested in broadband returns nearly four dollars to the economy, according to a Purdue University study."
The Inadequacy of School Reopening Plans: "This spring, 'remote instruction' was often a euphemism for 'no instruction.' For some children, it involved little more than intermittently watching a screen. Others didn’t even have a screen to watch; in Los Angeles alone, a quarter of a million households with school-age children lacked a computer with broadband."
Mask Up: One way to handle people not wearing masks.... Does this count as a STEM project?
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