Divided Community Seeks to Influence School Board on Reopening

Earlier this school year, Jamie Perdigon’s fifth grader set off for one of his two weekly in-person days at Nether Providence Elementary School. He never made it to class. School staff, his family, and the police searched for hours before they found him.

Perdigon says her son panicked on his way to school. He had been unable to complete his assignments during the three days he learns at home under the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District’s hybrid instructional model. “I don’t want to go to school and not have all my stuff done,” he told her. “But I don’t know how to get my stuff done.” 

Perdigon and her husband both work outside the home. This leaves their fifth grader and his first-grade brother to manage Zoom school on their own, “with me calling them constantly” on the phone, Perdigon says. She reports that the boys’ struggles are only growing worse.

For weeks, the district has been working on plans to address the concerns of families such as Perdigon’s.

At a January 25 school board meeting, board president David Grande announced that the district was working on a proposal to allow families to choose returning to full-time in-person instruction. He cited a new report, “Schools and the Path to Zero,” from Harvard University, Brown University, and New America, that suggests current 6-foot distancing requirements can safely be reduced to 3 feet for elementary students and, in some cases, for secondary students as well. (Read the report at swat.ink/path-to-zero.) Maintaining 6 feet of separation among students has been the most intractable hurdle to resuming in-person instruction full time, according to district administrators.

In advance of a special February 1 school board meeting (eventually canceled) at which the proposal was to have been presented and voted on, at least four petitions with divergent views on reopening circulated through the community via email and social media. At the board’s regularly scheduled February 8 meeting, administrators presented a plan and timeline for full reopening, and members heard comments from nearly 70 community members. The board did not vote on the plan. (See article above.) 

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags into its second winter, its toll on students, families, teachers, and school staff continues to mount. With vaccine distribution underway but rife with delays, the best way forward remains contentious.

Getting to ‘Open’ Safely

Frannie Reilly

“I think we all have the same goal,” says Frannie Reilly, who has four children in district schools. “It’s a question of how to get there safely.”

More than 650 people signed a petition penned by Reilly that asks for a continued mandate of 6-foot distancing. The petition asserts that this is the best way to protect the health of students, teachers, and the community. “The more people who teachers and staff interact with, and the longer those interactions last, the higher the risk of COVID-19 spread,” the petition reads, pointing to guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control last month. 

Reilly says it’s hard to understand why the district would deviate from guidelines it has been following all year. She also notes that recent studies suggesting that 3-foot distancing is sufficient assume that other mitigation measures — masking, cleaning, ventilation — are fully in place. “Are we following all of those?” she asks. “Do the studies take into account new variants that are more highly contagious?”

An elementary school teacher who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job says many teachers share Reilly’s concerns about new COVID variants and her questions about other mitigation measures. This teacher notes that some classrooms don’t have windows that open. “If we could see an expert tell us about the ventilation systems, that would help,” she says. “There’s a lack of trust.”

For some teachers and parents, the board’s recent willingness to consider 3-foot distancing seems sudden and capricious. Some experts, they say, hew to the 6-foot standard. “We teachers have wondered why we are jumping to this Harvard study,” the elementary school teacher says. “It feels like a pick-a-study kind of thing.” She also expresses concern about “behind-closed-doors maneuvering” that generated the proposal, calling it “a slap in the face.” (District administrators did not respond to our emails requesting comment.) 

Both Reilly and some teachers maintain that the current hybrid model works well for many parents in the district and express concern about the impact of changing to a new system three-quarters of the way through the year. Will some families currently using hybrid switch to the Online Academy rather than send kids into more crowded classrooms? Will students who have bonded with teachers and classmates be shuffled into new classes with people they don’t know?

Acknowledging that some families are struggling with virtual instruction, Reilly suggests that those most at risk be prioritized for returning to full-time school. “Let’s help the students and families who need it the most,” she says. 

Vaccinate First

David Waldman

“We love our students and we want to be with them,” says David Waldman, president of the Wallingford-Swarthmore Education Association, the local teachers union. “We want to give families and students as many opportunities as possible to share space with us and to learn in person with us.” 

But Waldman says returning to classrooms full time should wait until every Wallingford-Swarthmore staff member has had a chance to get two vaccine doses. 295 of 319 union members signed a petition, delivered to the board on January 29, urging the delay of full in-person learning until all teachers and staff are vaccinated.

One teacher, who takes medication that suppresses her immune system, says she is frustrated by social media posts deriding teachers for worrying about getting sick. She says she hopes not to return to in-person school full time until after getting vaccinated, adding, “I’d feel a whole lot safer.”

According to this teacher, it’s nearly impossible to maintain required distance from students at all times. “When it’s a student who can’t pack their backpack or open their snack, 6 feet is not reality.” She says she can tolerate that risk with 10 students. But having 25 or more students in a class, if in-person instruction returns full time, would be “too much.” 

Evolving Information

“Evidence gathered this fall around the world and in the U.S. suggests that schools can open, even in conditions of wide community spread, and achieve low and even near zero transmission in the school building,” write the authors of “Schools and the Path to Zero.” They point to “the harms of remote schooling” to urge that schools return to in-person learning “across most school contexts.” A petition asking the school board to amend the 6-foot distancing requirement to 3 feet was signed by over 400 people. It points not only to the “Path to Zero” report but to studies from the Mayo Clinic and guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics as well. 

Photo by Anne Neborak, Delco News Network

As a doctor working in a hospital, Monica Zeitz, the petition’s author, says she has first-hand knowledge of the seriousness of COVID. But she says she had to speak up after learning at a school board meeting that the imperative for 6 feet of distancing was keeping kids from going back to in-person school full time. “I keep up with this literature,” she says. Aware that the 6-foot standard was not consistent with recent evidence, she wanted to share this information with the board.

“National experts have carefully considered the risk to teacher/student/community, as well as the new COVID variants, and concluded that children and teachers can safely return to classrooms with minimum 3-foot distancing, with mitigation strategies like masking in place,” she reports.

Zeitz also cites studies showing racial and socioeconomic disparity between kids who are managing under the current system and those who are failing. “Those kids are going to fall further and further behind,” she predicts. 

Failing

Maribeth Kearns, the mother of four students in district schools, knows firsthand about kids falling behind. She says her 16-year-old daughter went from being a straight-A student to failing the first semester of 10th grade. In November, the girl’s mental health deteriorated so badly that she had to be hospitalized for two weeks. Kearns’ eighth grader, who has an individual educational plan for a learning disability, has also been failing. 

“Virtual is why we’re in this situation,” Kearns says. “If you have working parents, they’re not there to say, ‘Take out your math book.’” Some local parents have hired tutors or enrolled their children in private schools with full-time in-person instruction. “But some of us can’t afford it.”

Kearns reports that her fourth-grade twins aren’t learning much either, but she’s less worried about them. For one thing, they have each other. Besides, she says, “They have time to make up that gap.”