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What It Would Take to Safely Reopen Schools
Experts fear that without proper funding or precautions, schools will remain ill-equipped to safely reopen to students
If schools reopen this fall, health experts say there will almost surely be fresh outbreaks of Covid-19 among children and school staff, who will in turn spread the virus to their family and members of their community. Doubts that classrooms may soon accept students once again are mounting almost as fast as coronavirus infections — Harvard University on Monday became the latest institution to announce that all courses for the upcoming academic year will be carried out online. But doing the same for K-12 schools, keeping children at home, would be hugely detrimental to the well-being of the kids, their parents, and the overall economy, with women, people of color, and lower-income populations hit the hardest.
While many other nations did their homework on pandemic response and corralled their outbreaks, the United States missed the bus, according to infectious-disease researchers and other health experts. Many have watched with frustration and disbelief as the federal government and many states squandered the lockdowns by reopening too fully and too quickly and allowing the coronavirus to roar back.
Anne Schuchat, MD, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Journal of the American Medical Association last week that the recent approach to the pandemic included “a lot of wishful thinking around the country.” New cases of the disease are now rising in most states and spiking out of control in several, and efforts to control the wildfire-like spread are literally starting over — but with the virus now far more pervasive than when schools shut down in the first place.
“If schools can’t get the money they need to safely reopen, then they won’t reopen, period.”
With the first school bells set to ring in just six weeks in some states, two huge questions remain: Can the country rein in the pandemic enough to accept the risks of opening schools? And with the costs of reopening estimated to be well over $100 billion, for everything from hand sanitizer and masks…
