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Not enough staff. Record numbers of COVID cases. Low vaccination rates.
Three weeks into a new school year, and COVID is bringing new and unexpected challenges for school officials, beyond the debate about masks that have dominated board meetings across the country.
“It’s getting much more difficult by the day for our superintendents and principals and teachers,” Alabama State Superintendent Eric Mackey told state board members at their retreat on Tuesday in Montgomery.
“We really just did not expect such a vicious spike (in COVID-19 cases) that would hit right when the school year started, which is what happened with the Delta variant,” Mackey told AL.com Tuesday afternoon.
Read more Ed Lab: Some Alabama schools already reporting record COVID case counts.
A statewide tally of reported student and staff COVID cases is not available; state officials have promised a dashboard next month. Some Alabama schools already have had to shift to remote learning either due to an increase in COVID cases among students or because they didn’t have enough substitute teachers to fill in for teachers out sick or quarantining.
These challenges come on the heels of a difficult year last school year and have pushed officials to utilize contingency plans they say they didn’t expect to put in play this early in the year.
“We could not have predicted in May that there was going to be this August spike. Nobody in public health was predicting it. The CDC wasn’t predicting it. We just didn’t know,” Mackey said.
School officials are working hard to keep schools open for in-person instruction, he said, but that is a big challenge with the rising number of COVID cases in parts of Alabama.
While only a handful of Alabama schools have had to shift to remote learning so far, Mackey fears that could change.
Related: COVID staffing crisis sends some Clay County students home.
Related: Schools, health officials work to offer vaccines to students in Alabama.
As state superintendent, Mackey doesn’t have the authority to dictate policy or mandates around when schools should close, require masks or require vaccines.
“All of those are local decisions,” he said.
So far, Gov. Kay Ivey and state health officer Dr. Scott Harris have declined to issue any statewide orders related to schools, leaving decisions in the hands of local officials. Ivey also signed a “vaccine passport” ban this spring that prevents schools and universities from requiring vaccines for students and staff.
Without a statewide health order like the one in place last year, school boards and superintendents are making decisions based on what’s happening in their communities.
“We were hoping that this year would be the start of an opportunity to have a more normal school year,” Pike County Superintendent Mark Bazzell told AL.com.
But that hasn’t been the case, and his was the first district in the state to temporarily close schools for deep cleaning Aug. 20.
That closing came because of a sudden increase in COVID cases among students. Officials say the virus was spreading at school.
“About 20% of cases could be traced to in-school spread,” Bazzell said. “We can’t do anything about the other 80%, those are happening outside of school.”
The district is now screening students before they enter school, he said. Numbers of new COVID cases since last week appear to be down; Bazzell said school nurses are reporting fewer new cases through the school’s online system.
Cases in his district have been primarily among students, he said, which is different from last year when cases were spread about evenly among students and staff. “I think that’s because we probably have a 65% to 70% vaccination rate among our employees,” Bazzell said.
Vaccines are key, Mackey said, in keeping schools open for in-person instruction -- but not enough Alabamians are getting them, another problem he said he did not foresee when schools were making their reopening plans in March and April.
“[We thought] large numbers of people would be vaccinated by the fall and so we had identified our big struggles were going to be children under 12. We knew that there would be issues with children under 12,” he said. “We didn’t think it would affect the teachers, because my assumption was that pretty much every employee, every adult in the school would be vaccinated.”
The issue has baffled school leaders who have encouraged vaccinations, including Macon County’s Superintendent Jacqueline Brooks.
Alabama trails the country in the percentage of eligible adults taking the vaccine. Statewide, 45% of all adults have been fully inoculated, but that rate varies at the county level from a low of 19% in Russell County up to 41% in both Lowndes and Madison counties.
There is no public information on the percentage of school staff who have been vaccinated.
As to when schools should shift to remote learning or close down for deep cleaning, with COVID, Mackey said, state education and health officials will leave decisions in the hands of local officials.
School officials have to consider multiple variables, including whether the school has enough adults where they are needed and whether an outbreak could be underway.
With the flu, schools’ rule of thumb typically is that if 20% of students are absent, the school needs to be shut down for deep cleaning -- a marker several schools hit in 2019 during a bad outbreak.
“The problem is that (with COVID) most schools have to close in-person instruction well before 20% because there aren’t enough people to safely and effectively operate the school,” Mackey said.
On Wednesday, an entire seventh grade at a Clay County junior high school had to shift to remote learning because teachers weren’t available to teach them in person.
About two-thirds of Alabama school districts, charter schools and magnet schools currently require masks, according to an Ed Lab tracker, though many local requirements are currently set to sunset after Labor Day.
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