Update on Omicron and what's happening in schools in NYC and elsewhere to limit transmission

Correction:  Just informed that on Dec. 29, CDC updated its guidance & now calls for 10 days quarantine for any Covid positive school staff or students. So the DOE directive that staff should return after 5 days as long as their symptoms are minor is NOT aligned with the CDC. 

Omicron is spreading like wildfire, and in response several urban and suburban districts are keeping their schools closed or going remote next week, either for the full week or part of it, including Seattle, Detroit, Atlanta and Newark.  In NY state, among the districts that are going remote are Yonkers, New Rochelle,  Mount Vernon, and according to reliable sources, Ossining, Westbury and Freeport.

In NYC, the citywide seven-day positivity rate is an incredible 32%.  [update 1/3/22: now 33.5%.] In some neighborhoods, the rate is as high as 40%. Yet instead of  going remote, the DOE has made an agreement with the UFT they will increase the weekly random Covid screening to 20% of all students and staff who have consented, and will be providing teachers with testing kits and K95 masks each week.  

Students will only get testing kits if they're exposed, and no masks -- very unfortunate especially given that they are less likely to be fully vaccinated and thus presumably more vulnerable if they do get infected. 

In addition, DOE has updated their screening process.  Here is the new form students, staff and visitors have to fill out daily, which is confusing.  

First of all, it suggests that if you were exposed to a Covid case out of school and not fully vaccinated, you need to quarantine for at least seven days, but if exposed in school, not to quarantine at all unless you test positive, despite the fact that it is impossible for most people to distinguish the source of their infection and unclear why it should make a difference.  

Secondly, the new screening requires infected teachers to return to school after five days even if they are still symptomatic as long as their  symptoms are not serious and they wear a K95 mask.  This is aligned with the new CDC guidance, but still seems excessively risky. awho log in wwho ti klienho wwho havwhowho://twitter.com/jasonwhwhoiiimartinez81/status/1477417610920693762?s=20

Also, a message widely tweeted by teachers today appears to say that the DOE Situation Room is no longer even going to attempt to track transmission within schools, but is leaving this critical task up to overburdened school administrators and teachers.  

If this message was distributed to your school and/or I've misinterpreted it, please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at info@classsizematters.org.  Thanks! 

See also the chart with reasonable precautions and protocols that Jay Brown, a member of CEC District 21, put together and that Nina Kulkarni, a teacher and parent,14776 alonlkarni_ninastatus//94823670980610?s=20 has recommended on twitter.

CM Treyger urges the DOE to report class sizes on Nov. 15 as legally required, disaggregated this year according to the type of class

Update 11/16/2020: DOE just responded to CM Treyger’s October 15 letter to say they will delay the release of class size data that was due November 15 until Dec. 31, and any disaggregated data until Feb. 15.  More on this here.

Last week, Council Education Chair Mark Treyger wrote a letter to Chancellor Carranza urging him to report on school-specific and citywide class size averages as the law requires on Nov. 15, and also to disagregate the data bgy type of instruction used: either in-person learning, remote classes for blended learning students, and remote classes for full-time remote students.   His letter is here and below and here is a Chalkbeat article about this issue.

Disaggregating the data is critical, because as the letter points out, in-person classes have been extremely small for the purpose of social distancing, while some online learning classes have been reported by parents to be as large as 60-100 students or more.  See recent articles in NY Post, WSJ and Gothamist about this issue.

Randi Levine at Advocates for Children also testified to the fact that children with IEPs requiring class sizes of no more than 12 students per class have experienced class sizes twice or three times as large.

Averaging across all three types of classes would tend to obscure just how large the online classes really are.  Though we have little research showing how to make remote learning more successful and engaging, some educators have noted that “limiting class sizes may be even more important online than in the physical classroom...On Zoom, for example, it is helpful for a teacher to be able to see all of their students’ faces at once, instead of having to scroll through multiple screens.”

Two prominent researchers have written that it's important to "lower online-class sizes. Common sense suggests that smaller groups and lower student-adult ratios can help increase interactive opportunities.”

On Monday, at the Mayor's press conference, the Chancellor did say that schools have been reporting attendance data in "literally three buckets of attendance every single day": in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes.  So reporting the class size data in these three separate categories should not be difficult for them to do.

Bobson Wong, HS teacher, on why before reopening schools, NYC needs time and resources to get it right.

Bobson Wong is a math teacher at a NYC public high school and author of "The Math Teacher's Toolbox."   Here is what he wrote after I asked him how he would design a school reopening plan for NYC.  If others would like to offer their school reopening ideas to this blog, please send them to info@classsizematters.org. - LH

"I would focus on improving remote learning for everyone. School buildings should be thought of as places where students can come to do their work if they're unable or unwilling to work from home. They'd receive a place to work, technology and Internet access if necessary, and help in using it. If necessary, they could receive in-person help with content from teachers (think of it as tutoring). 

Teachers could rotate providing support. Most students and staff could then stay home, where we could focus on improving the remote learning experience for everyone. Thinking of school buildings as support centers would also enable schools to occasionally bring small groups of students into the building for specific reasons (e.g. invite seniors in so guidance counselors could help them with college applications, or inviting students in crisis to receive emotional support). 

Thinking of school buildings as support centers is also compatible with other ideas, such as organizing outdoor learning experiences. They are not mutually exclusive. Focusing on providing support for remote learning is the simplest plan right now, given the limited resources that schools have available. Most of the hybrid schedules I've seen have left everyone - students, parents, and school staff - confused and exhausted. 

Some people argue that children, especially younger ones, don't transmit the virus and can return to schools safely. That may be true. We could have spent the last six months coming up with a workable plan in which younger students could have been invited back to school buildings. 

We could have pressured legislators to increase resources to schools so that we could provide adequate academic and social-emotional and support for everyone. Unfortunately, we've squandered the last six months doing nothing. 

The city has mismanaged the reopening of school buildings. Every teacher I know, myself included, quickly recognized the many gaps and flaws in the city's plans. We know how to organize complicated tasks, but to my knowledge K-12 educators were not part of the planning process, so our expertise has been wasted. 

Instead, as is often the case, teachers are left filling in the gaps. In this environment, pushing to reopen school buildings right now is simply irresponsible. The city needs time and resources to get it right. Until then, we should focus on improving remote learning, not on tweaking a flawed plan."

How the city's "plan" for re-opening schools highlights the cruel inequities of class size as never before

Yesterday, the DOE released the preliminary outlines of a “plan” for how schools will be restructured in the fall is they are reopened next fall. DOE officials have determined that to maintain proper social distancing, a range of 9-12 students per classroom will be allowed, varying according to the size of the classroom.

Because class sizes are much larger than this in nearly every school, schools will have to separate their students into two or three or sometimes four groups who will take turns attending school in person, to be provided with remote learning when not in school. Families can also choose full-time remote learning with their children never attending school in person.

As a result of vastly different levels of school and classroom overcrowding across the city, some schools will be able to offer about half of their students in-person instruction each day; while others may only be able to allow each student to attend school one or two days a week. Or alternatively, different schools will opt for different groups of students attending school every other week or every third week.

For the most overcrowded schools, there will likely be three cohorts of students with complex schedules (not counting the group who stays home for full time remote learning) as shown to the right.

As usual with most such DOE documents, it provokes as many questions as it answers:

1. How will the existing number of teachers be able to teach three or four different student groups at the same time, including the ones who are present in school, the ones who are home receiving online instruction part-time, and those receiving full-time remote instruction --– particularly with planned budget cuts and a staffing freeze to schools?
2. If schools are encouraged to repurpose gymnasiums and cafeterias to allow for more classes to be taught at once, as the Chancellor has suggested, what additional personnel will be used to teach those students?
3. Will the same teachers be assigned to teach the same groups of students over time, whether in person or remotely?
4. What will working parents do when their kids are learning from home and cannot be in school?
5. How will busing and after school be handled?

At a Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council meeting this morning, Chancellor Carranza said DOE will be identifying all individuals who have teaching certification -including himself – and may thus be redeployed and assigned to teach students. This would be an extremely smart move. While according to DOE, the average class size across all schools is 26, the teacher-student ratio is only 14 .

Carranza also said that a minimum of live instruction will be required with remote learning, and that he is working with union right now to ensure this, though with the caveat that he realizes it’s not healthy for students to be on computers too many hours a day.

Clearly the problem of how to maintain social distancing is exacerbated because of the chronic overcrowding of NYC public schools. This fall, at least 275,000 students were crammed into classes of 30 or more, and more than 55,000 students were in classes of 34 or more. 514,450 students attended overcrowded schools (at 101% capacity or more) according to the latest Blue Book from 2028-2019—the annual Enrollment, Capacity, and Utilization Report.

Here is a list of the 92 schools with utilization rates of 150% or more. As of 2017-2018, 42 over-utilized high schools across 41 buildings were already forced to adopt split-sessions in scheduling because of overcrowding, according to a DOE report on Space Overutilization the District planning webpage What this suggests in these severely overcrowded schools, most students will likely only be able to attend school one or two days a week, or one or two weeks out of five.

What is impossible to imagine is how learning next year will be provided equitably, despite the protestations on the DOE planning webpage that “Our vision of educational equity and excellence for all students persists even during this time of crisis.”

First of all, our school overcrowding is worse and our class sizes far larger than those in the rest of the state – meaning students elsewhere will likely be provided with far more face-to-face learning and support . See this chart with the latest available data from the NYSED website:

Decades of disinvestment in class size and school facilities by successive Mayors and Chancellors have led to inequities, not just in NYC compared to the rest of the state, but also within the city, with some schools having much larger class sizes and levels of overcrowding.

To make things worse, during both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, DOE officials have tried to squeeze more students into smaller spaces to facilitate school co-locations. The more schools are put into a building, the less instructional classroom space is available to students, because of the need to replicate “redundant administrative or cluster room purposes,” as DOE admits in the Space Overutilization report cited above.

One way that DOE has squeezed more students into schools for the purpose of co-location by revising the “Instructional Footprint,” a document that is supposed to govern co-location decisions. In 2010, the DOE lowered the minimum size of all standard size classrooms in the Footprint except for Kindergarten from 600 square feet to 500 square feet . More recently, they lowered the definition of a standard size cluster room from a minimum of 1000 square feet to 500 square feet.

This is much smaller than the way in which most states define a standard sized classroom. For example, Georgia mandates at least 750 square feet for Kindergarten to third grade classrooms, 660 square feet for classrooms in grades four through eight, and 600 square feet for high school classrooms. In California, standard sized classrooms are even larger, and Los Angeles is currently planning to lower class size to 16 students per class instead of our 8-10 to achieve social distancing in a “typical 960 square foot classroom.” A summary produced by the School Design and Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia says the recommended size of the elementary school classroom in the United States is approximately 900 square feet, and the average size of a secondary school classroom at 1024 square feet .

Over time, DOE made other changes to the Instructional Footprint to cram more students into smaller and smaller spaces. The original Footprint from 2008 assumed class sizes of twenty students per class in grades K-3, and 25 in grades 4-5, but in 2009, the DOE increased the class size standards for grades 4-5 to 28 students, and in 2011, they eliminated any class size standards in any schools, except in the case of alternative learning centers, transfer high schools, full time GED programs, and Young Adult Borough Centers. This elimination of class size standards from the Footprint was made without public input or explanation. [Much of this is explained in our Space Crunch report on p. 21]

In December 2014, the Blue Book Working Group appointed by Chancellor Farina proposed that the school utilization formula be revised to be aligned to the smaller classes in the DOE’s original class size reduction plan of no more than 23 students per class in grades 4-8^th grade and 25 in high school, rather than 28 and 30 students per class, respectively. These revisions would be necessary if the DOE ever intended to build enough schools to implement a citywide class size reduction plan, as de Blasio promised to when he was campaigning to be elected Mayor. City Hall sat on the Working Group’s recommendations for six months and then rejected them, without explanation, in July 2015.

According to the DOE, parents will soon be forced to make difficult decisions on whether to send their children to school in shifts or keep them at home full time. The online portal to register this decision will open on July 15, with a deadline of August 7. Whether schools will be able to tell parents by then how many days a week their children will be allowed to attend classes in person is unclear, as this in turn may depend in part on how many families decide to opt into full-time learning.

The glaring limitations and complications of these schedules, driven by the excessive class sizes in so many schools across the city, should force the Mayor and the Chancellor to pay attention to the inherent inequities in the system, which weren’t created but exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis. All stakeholders have been confronted in a way as never before with the overriding need to implement an effective long-term plan to reduce class size. As Deborah Alexander of CEC 30 wrote to our NYC Education news list serv, “If this doesn't make DOE wake up to the issue of class size, nothing will.”

Problems with remote learning from the perspective of a NYC student and a NYC teacher

First, here is testimony from Joshua Applewhite, NYC high school student, at yesterday's City Council hearings, who said that because of remote learning, "I feel like a robot. As a matter of fact, I feel like this whole situation is handled like we’re robots and we’re not humans with different feelings and different circumstances and different situations.” 

More on the findings from these hearings here and here, including the fact that the city’s summer school plan for remote learning calls for only one counselor or social worker for every 1,045 students and only one teacher for 30 struggling students.

Below this video is a piece by Ronit Wrubel, a NYC teacher, who points out another big problem  with remote learning - it's difficult for teachers to see their students' eyes.

DON'T FORGET THE EYES by Ronit Wrubel

Exactly 10 years ago, in April of 2010, I wrote an essay called "Don't Forget The Eyes".

I had been teaching using a document camera where I projected images onto a pull-down screen and showed most of my lessons using slides, photos, and various worksheets that had been transferred onto clear acetate pages. I used colored write on/wipe off markers to share my teaching points. I found value in the interactivity of this ‘teaching tool’.

My document camera was positioned behind my class meeting area in order to properly project what we were learning. The children would look at the screen while listening to me. They'd raise their hands and crane their necks backwards to respond, then forwards to the screen, and on and on again. It became the new normal, but it never felt right to me. Something was missing.

I couldn't see their eyes.

I couldn't see their smiles. I couldn't see their 'aha moments'. I couldn't see a look of confusion. I couldn’t see a glimpse of humor. I couldn't see their body language or their glances towards each other. I couldn’t see sadness. I couldn’t see a twinkle.

I couldn't see their eyes.

I moved my document camera – I reverted to more time with chart paper and the chalkboard and I eventually got a SmartBoard for forward facing teaching.

I saw their eyes. And it was glorious.

Until now. Now there’s a new normal. Now I'm not in a classroom. And I won't be, possibly, for the rest of this school year. And the children are stuck at home. And they’re confused. And lonely. And bored. And scared. And their parents are faced with the difficult task of working from home, or not. And helping ‘homeschool’ their seven or eight year olds. Without the time or knowledge or tools. And I’m home using my computer, Google Classroom, and more than a dozen websites and platforms to teach my 26 second-graders. But it doesn’t feel right to me. Something is missing.

I can’t see their eyes.

I can’t see their smiles. I can’t see their ‘aha moments’. I can’t see confusion. I can’t see a glimpse of humor. I can’t see body language or interaction. I can’t see sadness. I can’t see a twinkle.

I can’t see their eyes.

We are living in the midst of global trauma. A pandemic, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a century. There are no words to describe how sad this is for us all. For the lives lost, the lives impacted, the lives upended, the lives teetering on the edge. The steps being taken now are the right ones. We have to flatten the curve, stem the tide, keep safe until we know more and see more. We have to change the paradigm of teaching and learning. We have to and we are and we will.

I understand the decision to keep NYC schools closed for now. I understand that keeping children, parents, teachers and support staff healthy and safe is the proper choice. I understand that remote learning is the right way to continue. And I understand that I can find ways to ‘see’ my students using various online tools. But it’s not the same.

I’ll be there for my students in all the ways I can. I’ll work with my colleagues and my administration and a plethora of online platforms. I’ll devote endless hours to finding the best ways to use technology so I can make the rest of this school year exciting, engaging, and academically rewarding. I’ll attend to their emotions as well as their skills. \
I’ll keep making videos, and screencasts, and slideshows and documents and parent emails and updates and at home projects and online searches. And I’ll schedule live sessions with my class. I’ll keep the learning going. I’ll keep the class community together in all the ways possible. I’ll still be their teacher and they’ll still be my students. But it’s not the same.

I miss their eyes.