Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.

The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to temporarily salve the loss of funds tied to falling enrollment and to staff and programs. Those funds dry up in 17 months. As budget deficits grow and housing costs drive families out of urban areas, education leaders are staring down a host of unpalatable options, from half-empty buildings to staff.

“I’m not a pro-school closure guy. That’s the worst part of school reform,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant and a former Denver Public Schools official. “But if anyone was holding out hope for a bounce back, we have put that to rest.”

The Parkrose School District, outside Portland, Oregon, is one of many grappling with a budget shortfall.

“We have some decisions to make in the next few months,” said Sonja McKenzie, a board member in the district, where enrollment has fallen 12% since 2018. Now leaders might have to slash positions for special education assistants. Talk of layoffs is also surfacing in , and .

McKenzie went door-to-door last fall asking voters to approve a tax levy to fund 22 positions, reminding them that the district, where nearly 30% of students are Hispanic, heeded their call to hire bilingual family liaisons. Voters .

Some families, she said, have been “priced out” of the area, heading east to Gresham or across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington, where they can find more affordable housing. Those areas, McKenzie said, have “benefited from our challenges.” 

Desperation and aspiration

����Ӱ��’s enrollment analysis is based on figures from 41 states provided exclusively by Burbio, a data company, and additional data from the nation’s 20 largest school systems.

Since last year, enrollment has declined 2.5% in Chicago, 2.4% in Houston and 2% in Nevada’s Clark County, while New York and Los Angeles saw drops of just under 2%. The Hillsborough County district in Florida, which includes Tampa, and the Gwinnett County School District, near Atlanta, are the only two large districts where enrollment now exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

Large district enrollment trends from 2018-19 to 2022-23

The graphic below shows enrollment trends for the nation’s 20 largest school districts. Divided by region, the breakdowns include changes in overall enrollment as well as in kindergarten. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

In California, which has seen a whopping 5% drop in its student population since 2020, the enrollment decline has slowed, according to . But the downward slope in birth rates and exodus of parents from high-priced areas has left district and charter leaders with limited options.

Summit Public Schools in California’s Bay Area — a well-established charter network that spawned an online learning platform still used by 300 schools nationwide — will at the end of this school year. 

Following a community and in Oakland, the local school board decided in January not to close several schools. Now, amid an ongoing , the board is reconsidering whether to because of enrollment decline.

“There is always this quality and convenience tension,” said Lakisha Young, CEO of Oakland Reach, a parent advocacy organization. “Everyone wants a school in their neighborhood that they can walk their kids to.”

But she called the emotional debate over closing schools a distraction from more important issues — namely that a majority of students aren’t . A third of families in the city , and some have moved further inland to Antioch or southeast to the Central Valley. 

“If people have the opportunity to move to other places that are slower and quieter and safer, they are going to do that,” she said. “These decisions are not just made out of desperation, they are also out of aspiration.”

‘You just come here’

Some of those same aspirations are fueling a Republican push to give unhappy parents more options. Twelve states now offer education savings accounts, which allow families to use public funds to pay the costs of private school or homeschooling. Despite pushback from such programs take funding away from public schools and lack accountability, similar legislation has been introduced in several more states, including , and .

“This pandemic was the perfect incubation event that really caused homeschooling to thrive,” said Bob Templeton, another enrollment consultant with , a housing market research company. “We’re seeing this dramatic change in how we educate kids.”

In Texas, where the legislature is currently , existing options like charters and homeschooling have contributed to a decline in what Templeton calls the “capture rate” — the percentage of children from a particular community attending their local public school. 

“If they’re down 200 kids in kindergarten and it doesn’t return, then in five to seven years, that district is going to be down several thousand kids,” Templeton said. “You need to get ready to close schools.”

Statewide enrollment shifts since 2021-22

*Click the circle next to state to see districts with the greatest enrollment gain, greatest enrollment loss and % change for state’s largest district. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

He consults for districts surrounding some of the state’s large urban systems and used to be able to reliably calculate that 100 new homes would result in 50 more students. Not anymore. 

He also monitors between districts. One school system he works with, Pflugerville, near Austin, took in 584 students from other systems this year. But almost 5,400 transferred out to both charters and other districts. Leaders have put off closing schools for now, which Templeton said just “kicks the can down the road.” 

He and Eschbacher advise districts to stay competitive by designing school models that parents want. In some cases, that’s paying off. 

The San Antonio Independent School District has had success with a 2017 state law that provides incentives to partner with charters and nonprofit organizations to run schools. 

Rebecca McMains decided to enroll her daughter in one of them, Lamar Elementary, after considering close to 10 public, private and charter schools in the area. Because her daughter has disabilities and an “elaborate” special education plan, the choice wasn’t easy.

“I knew I was going to be heard at Lamar. They are very parent-focused,” said McMains. She said staff members respond to her texts and don’t push back when she has a request, like having a nurse accompany her daughter on a field trip to NASA. “I’m now being thanked for my advocacy.”

But some parents have found their local public schools loath to accommodate the needs of those they are used to seeing as a captive audience.

Jana Wilcox Lavin, a Las Vegas mom, runs Opportunity 180, a nonprofit that supports school choice and formerly led a that converted low-performing schools into charters. Nonetheless, she was willing to consider her Clark County neighborhood school for her daughter, who starts kindergarten in 2024.

When she called the local school to ask for a tour, officials turned her down, citing concerns about student privacy. She turned to a district administrator, who said she could visit the building but not observe classrooms. Spokesman Tod Story said that while no policy prohibits parents from visiting schools, officials “err on the side of caution to protect our students.”

 Lavin said she just wanted to make a well-informed choice.

“When I asked how I should assess if the zoned school was a good fit,” she said, “I was told, ‘We are your neighborhood school. You just come here.’ ”

An ‘absolute asteroid’ 

That’s less true than ever before. The options available to families have expanded so rapidly that researchers are struggling to keep up.

Counts of how many students are homeschooled are and private school enrollment figures can be a year or two behind. That’s one reason Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who tracks enrollment trends, was unable to account for of students who left public schools. 

That uncertainty makes it hard to tell whether the American school system is experiencing temporary chaos or a more permanent sea change.

Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the pandemic an “absolute asteroid” of a disruptive event. Still, he doesn’t expect ESAs or other emerging models to cause as much damage to the public education system as predict.

“It’s hard to overestimate the incumbent’s strength,” he said.

That’s the case in Florida, where enrollment grew 1.3% this year and the Hillsborough district expects to keep building schools for years to come to accommodate growth. 

In states with declining numbers, like Oregon, district leaders are more wary. School choice hope to get an ESA initiative on the ballot next year, but McKenzie, the Parkrose board member, is concerned such a program would hobble district schools that are already strapped for cash.

“I can understand a parent may feel like they have a better option,” she said.“But it creates a divisive system of who has the resources and who doesn’t. Less resources for the classroom impacts the whole community.”

Kamenetz had spent years covering the heaviest stories on the education beat as an award-winning reporter at NPR, from the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans classrooms to the potential risks of excessive screen time. And according to her sources, the coming pandemic wasn’t just going to drive down math scores or disrupt the teaching profession: Prolonged school closures would leave a mark on child safety, mental health and social development. 

The months that followed, shaped by academic stagnation and political division, frame Kamenetz’s new book, The Stolen Year. Released Tuesday by PublicAffairs, the volume reads like a reckoning with the predictions made by the experts she consulted more than two years ago. Each chapter examines a facet of social policy in America that was fundamentally challenged by the emergence of COVID-19, from the courts system to K-12 schools, and the effects that were felt by tens of millions of children.

And how much of her sources’ collective warning was validated?

“All of it,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Much of the social toll, measured in deaths or distance or deterioration of services, was unavoidable. But Kamenetz argues that the failure of online learning, and of in-person schools to reopen faster in thousands of districts, was also highly contingent — on leaders’ failure to adjust during the fateful summer of 2020, but also on experts and members of the media, whose message to the public was too often muddled. Though every Western country had to scramble to come to grips with a once-in-a-lifetime public health emergency, few kept children out of school longer than the United States. And virtually none were as divided in their political and policy responses.

Kamenetz observed those responses as a veteran journalist, but also as a mother of young children and a parent in New York City, where the official response to COVID was often scattershot. That experience “complicated” her view of public schooling in this country, she confided.

“I very much understand the perspective of people who feel betrayed by public schools, wherever they’re coming from politically,” she said. “There’s been such a fraying of the consensus around what is really our major piece of social infrastructure for families.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: What’s it been like reporting on the pandemic for over two years, including writing this book, as both a veteran education reporter and a mother of young kids?

Anya Kamenetz: Over that weekend after March 13, the day that schools started to close, I was trying to confirm a coronavirus case in my child’s school, which I was then going to report to WNYC [New York City’s public radio station] and NPR. It’s not regular for reporters to report on their own kids’ schools, but this was obviously of import.

For a couple of weeks, I’d been covering the college shutdowns in Asia and then in the U.S., which were a precursor to the K-12 shutdowns here. But when de Blasio made the call to shut down schools — which he did, with his characteristic leadership, very late on a Sunday night after saying he wouldn’t do it — that was really the beginning of it for me. And I knew it was going to be a very big deal because I had not only been at NPR for six years at that point, but I’d covered [Hurricane] Katrina, which I believed would be a decent parallel: You have this society-wide catastrophe, and within that, kids are pulled out of school amid all this instability and trauma. The impacts of that were devastating, and the empirically measured effects on young people in New Orleans were still there 10 years later. 

So my job was to document what was happening, and it was a very special position to be in with my skills and prior research. I also had an interest in refugee education and what is called “education in emergencies.” So my contacts in international development circles were some of the first people I called up to ask, “How’s this gonna go? What should I be looking out for?” And everything they told me panned out.

You’re originally from New Orleans, right?

Yes.

Your instinctive Katrina comparisons have unfortunately proven accurate — test score data from NWEA shows that learning loss during the pandemic is pretty comparable to the damage suffered by students in New Orleans after the hurricane.

From what I can tell, it’s actually worse. The latest NWEA data indicates that the average elementary student is on track to recover in three years; for Katrina, it was two years. And after Katrina, those kids went back to “better schools” — better funded schools, certainly, and schools that achieve higher test scores.

That’s not what we’re seeing here. In the July 2022 NWEA study, it found that middle schoolers weren’t making any gains. We don’t even have a trajectory for them. 

The predictions in the research pointed me to the conclusion that high school students were the ones to worry about because they were on a course to separate from school. It’s not a question of catching up, it’s a question of whether they were going to stay in school. That is something we should worry about, especially with college-going .

Getting back to the early guidance offered by your international sources: How many of their predictions panned out?

All of it panned out.

The idea that young people would go into paid work and that young girls would become caregivers; that the impact of school closures would match underlying inequalities in society, and that children who were privileged enough would see no difference; that continuity efforts to keep learning on-track — this stuff goes back to World War II, for instance, when the BBC had its own children’s service that carried school broadcasts — don’t reach everyone, and in fact multiply inequality because the kids who can benefit from those efforts are already advantaged. All of that was exactly what we saw.

Those insights were remarkably prescient. In my own reporting, there were also some dogs that didn’t bark, most notably some early coverage on the possibility of a Great Recession-type crunch on school finances. 

That’s right. There was a short-term spike in child hunger — it could have been two or three months — and we have to remember that even one month of increased hunger is very bad. But kids actually finished the end of the year with money in their pockets, so the economic picture is a little complicated. And there wasn’t the kind of housing crisis that left huge percentages of kids homeless, which is something that can happen after natural disasters. 

In fact, if you get into , you can see that between unemployment and CARES Act money, families spent more time at home with their kids. There’s obviously a segment of society that doesn’t have paid leave. Patricia [one of several parents profiled in The Stolen Year], who’s a mom in D.C. with two kids, worked in D.C. Public Schools; she had her child prematurely in July and then went back to work in August. So during the pandemic, it was the only time she was able to be home with her children. As hard as it was, she saw the advantage in it.

What comes through in the book is that there was a lot of contingency, particularly in those first pandemic months. Do you think there was a way that the initial COVID wave could have been handled better by education authorities, either at the local, state, or federal levels. Could things have gone significantly better than they did?

School closures were sort of handled in the spirit of President Trump when he said, “We’ve got to shut this whole thing down until we figure out what the hell’s going on.” They were not controversial in that early wave because it was happening all over the world, and people really needed a handle on what was happening. The first big mistake was not making a plan, as soon as we shut them down, of how we were going to open them back up. 

We had this false idea about a two-week turnaround, and people really froze and didn’t plan for the future. If you’re on this beat, you know that schools start planning for staffing and scheduling in the next academic year by April. And that was when schools in parts of Europe started reopening, in April and May. They were like, “This is truly an emergency measure, and we’re going to treat it as such. We’re not going to let it continue through inertia because if districts don’t have clear leadership and messaging, they’re not going to respond.” And that’s what we saw here.

It’s unclear to me what the academic effects were of not reopening schools to finish out the 2019-2020 school year, as opposed to the extended virtual learning that took place the following year. I suspect the bigger impact was the precedent of closing through the end of the year, which seemed to set us on a course toward virtual learning being the accepted way to deal with this.

I agree completely. The effect of reopening in May 2020 would have been to put the training wheels on and get everyone onboard with the fact that this was going to happen. It was described to me by a teacher in Florida who went back into the classroom in 2020. She was like, “I know colleagues who stayed home with medical exemptions, and when they came back, they were terrified. So I said, ‘Listen, it’s not that big a deal, we’re doing this.” 

What was absent was the comfort of everyday routine, and the sense of control that teachers can have when they have protocols. By not opening in the spring of 2020, we made it that much harder. And there was a slice of schools in blue states that didn’t open up until February, March, April 2021, and it got harder and harder the longer they waited.

It seems like what set the U.S. apart was the diversity of local responses we saw in the summer and fall of 2020. Of course, there wasn’t a ton of clear federal guidance, and God knows if blue states and districts would have taken that from the Trump administration, but it yielded this fractured approach to reopening and public health measures that carries on to this day.

Writing the book, I felt compelled to do this deep dive into the history of our public school system. Because it’s very different from our peer countries, which have a national system and a national curriculum and a minister of education who actually runs the schools. Instead of that, we have all these different districts.

All of which is to say that there was an absence of guidance from the top, but also an absence of data collection. I covered a study from Spain in September 2020, which tracked case rates by region. Every region had all the same protocols. After schools reopened, cases went up in one region, down in another region, and stayed flat in some others. So they released this paper and said, “We don’t think what you’re doing in schools is making a big difference, please carry on.” The CDC didn’t release an equivalent paper until, like, January [2021]!

Where was the information? — this mom-and-pop data company that was started for totally different reasons — became the nation’s go-to source for what schools are doing because the federal government just wasn’t tracking and releasing enough information. 

You mentioned Bill de Blasio’s sort of tortured initial move to close schools in New York City, which attracted a lot of criticism. But from the distance of two-plus years, I suspect that many observers wish that districts had been more deliberate in shuttering schools and keeping them shuttered, even if that’s clearly a case of Monday morning quarterbacking.

That’s right. More forward-thinking, more innovative leadership could have gone a long way. And as frustrating as it often was to live in de Blasio’s city, it’s worth remembering that of the big blue cities, they opened schools up first. Though they had really bad uptake of hybrid [learning] because it was untenable from a child care perspective, and also because they delayed reopening twice. 

People don’t understand that there’s a dynamic between parent trust and how you communicate the decisions you’re making. The more you hem and haw and quibble over things, the harder it is for parents to actually trust that you’re going to do the things you say you’re going to do. One lesson from this period is that being a bad communicator is a problem in and of itself.

The consequences of that miscommunication and opacity in decision-making are already being felt politically, with school board members enduring a wave of recall attempts and Democrats losing ground on the issue of K-12 education. I’m wondering if your own levels of trust in political leaders and education authorities have diminished.

The process of reporting this book has complicated my view of public schooling. 

That’s a pretty broad thing to say, but basically: I thought of public schooling as a public good and something that needed to be freely available to all people, and I still think that. But I also very much understand the perspective of people who feel betrayed by public schools, wherever they’re coming from politically — whether they think public schools are racist, or that they’re not representing their family’s point of view, or whatever. There’s been such a fraying of the consensus around what is really our major piece of social infrastructure for families. In terms of the , a lot of parents feel like they were forced to exit. 

Of course, time will tell. There’s a powerful pull back to normal, and some families are changing what they’re doing. You see a lot of expressions of relief about coming back [to school]. But from what I understand of , both politically red districts and districts that reopened sooner — those are often one and the same — are reporting a rebound in enrollment. Politically blue districts, and those that opened up later or kept mask mandates in place, are continuing to lose students, which is what we’re seeing in New York City. That’s more important than what people say in polls, I think.

I take your point that school closures were mostly uncontroversial when they were first enacted. From my recollection, the point where some of this dissatisfaction began to set in was in fall 2020. According to Burbio data you cite in the book, 42 percent of students returned to all-remote schools that September. 

I actually think it’s more. The federal government released a report in February 2021 breaking things down schools by what they offered: in-person, fully remote, or hybrid. But we know that within the in-person and hybrid categories, there were also families that chose remote instruction. In that study, around half of all students were still fully remote that February, so it’s pretty safe to say that a majority of kids were in remote-only schools in fall of 2020; probably only about one-third had an in-person option.

In New York City, to my knowledge, about one-third of kids were actually showing up to school at that time. And that was an “open district.”

Okay, that’s an important caveat. Whatever the exact figure was, massive numbers of kids didn’t have the option of attending school in-person, even months after some comparable countries had fully switched back. Why?

They had not planned to come back in-person. There was a statement by Gov. Gavin Newsom in summer of 2020 about potentially opening up for summer schools; as we know, California schools didn’t reopen until spring 2021. So they just didn’t do the planning necessary. We might also say that states didn’t have the necessary resources in terms of public health tracking and contact tracing. I spoke to a woman employed as a contract tracer in New Jersey, and her experience in that job was why she didn’t send her kid to school. She was like, “This isn’t working.”

The testing also wasn’t in place in 2020, and obviously, there was opposition from people who didn’t believe their workplace was going to be safe. Some of the opposition came in the form of bringing cardboard coffins to marches and saying that children were going to die. That was not supported by the evidence, but it was scary.

The messaging was very heated on both sides of the reopening debate. What I don’t really remember was a more dispassionate accounting that weighed the legitimate public health concerns of both families and school employees against the legitimate educational and social needs of kids. 

Absolutely. That was not done. And we can see that from the fact that there was no real attempt to triage the situation. 

San Francisco tried to do this. They said, “We have lists of kids who are in foster care, kids who are in substandard housing, kids who are recent immigrants, and kids who are disabled, and we’re going to prioritize them for inclusion in learning hubs.” Okay, great. But they only created half of the hub spaces they said they would. The failure is in not balancing what you’ve articulated as important needs, and instead allowing chaos in the market to take place instead of those things.

You mentioned child care, which was a troubled industry even before the pandemic. In the book, you memorably refer to a “laser maze” of obstacles to access care. What did the pandemic teach us about how the United States provides services in this area?

The pandemic made it really obvious that we have no infrastructure for care in this country, and in fact, it would be exaggerating to call it a system. There’s been research showing that a certain percentage of child care providers use their own food stamps to feed kids in their care because our subsidy system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. 

We also learned that it’s essential infrastructure, and people can’t go to work without child care. What we rely on for young kids is a gradient of unpaid and underpaid care. COVID made a certain amount of people recognize that, and I was very happy to see some of these ideas [for child care and pre-K subsidies] in Congress. But seeing them yanked away in this version of is really disheartening and makes you ask what it’s going to take for politicians to change this. 

Among the big priorities the Biden administration wanted to address in January 2021 — and even including some that weren’t big priorities then, like inflation — most have been acted upon. Not child care or pre-K.

Yeah. Political theorists would probably say that the climate movement pushed their issue to the top of the agenda. Health care for seniors has always been a win for politicians, and there’s a clear constituency of people who vote a lot on that issue. But when do moms have time to march? When can they crowd into Nancy Pelosi’s office and make it unavoidable for this to change? I’d love dads to do this too, but my point is that it takes organizing.

We both cover education research. How do you grade the performance of education experts and policy specialists, many of whom gained big microphones over the last few years? You brought up Burbio, which I definitely hadn’t heard of before 2020, but I was thinking of figures like Brown University economist Emily Oster: people who were not affiliated with government but took it upon themselves to gather what information was available and communicate it to the public.

That question is going to be the subject of a lot of research and reflection going forward: How does this ability to speak directly to the public affect how research is conducted, how it’s publicized and how it shapes public opinion?

We talked about the vacuum of guidance from the federal government in the early stages of COVID, which kind of distorted the whole information ecosystem. And then the virus kept changing in really uncertain ways such that Omicron acted differently than Delta, which acted differently from the first wave. People really wanted certainty, and there wasn’t certainty to be found, so it was a foregone conclusion that people peddling reassurance were going to get a lot of attention. 

Do you have anyone specific in mind?

My previous book was about screen time, which is a hotly contested area without as much data as you’d like. It’s also a situation that’s always changing because new forms of media emerge. Something I found very useful during the pandemic was just being able to fairly convey that truth to parents that just want information to navigate their day. You have to be very clear about what you don’t know and how to make a decision depending on what your specific concerns are.

I think that was why someone like Emily Oster got so popular. Her wasn’t telling people what to do, it was a framework for making decisions.

For me, the urgent need for information made the pandemic a unique period of connection between reporters and readers. I imagine you were getting a ton of feedback, both positive and negative, from parents on Twitter as the various COVID debates raged on.

The uncertainty was so excruciating that it led people to retreat to their corners and take refuge in what their tribe was doing. That’s why there was this subset of people who were like, “I’m a liberal mom who thinks my toddler shouldn’t have to wear a mask anymore. But people hate me for that and think that I’m a Trump supporter.” 

Because it was so polarized, it was very hard to deal with these gaps. Or sometimes there weren’t even gaps! It was more like, “You have a child with a speech impediment, but we have a grandparent at home, so our concerns are different.” There was a need to give people a little more grace.

I’d add that we’re education reporters, not science reporters, and when we had to call up epidemiologists to get your story, there was a lot of caution around that. It was hard for a lot of reporters, and that led to gaps in coverage: We were comfortable talking about what was happening academically but not as comfortable talking about public health. For that, we really listened to the health experts, and the priority of the health experts was preventing even one case of COVID. With a little more confidence, we could have taken a broader view and said, “We might be reducing COVID spread by x amount, but what’s happening to these kids at home?”

This wasn’t even a phenomenon restricted to the education press. In spring 2020, you could get the feeling that the only relevant expertise was in health. It almost would have been strange if reporters didn’t become deferential around experts in that field. 

“Deferential” is the exact right word. And the solution for it was for education reporters to stay in our lane and report on what was happening to kids. I realized early on that NPR didn’t have a child care beat; we didn’t have a child welfare reporter, so we didn’t really know what was happening as far as kids getting abused and not being flagged by a mandatory reporter. 

We just had a schools desk with three reporters for the whole country, and one was doing higher ed. That wasn’t enough to cover what was happening to kids, particularly when schools were closed.

It takes so long to pitch, write, and edit a book like this. I’m curious how much changed after you submitted your first draft to the publisher, and if you had to rewrite a lot of this as conditions on the ground evolved.

I would say that trend lines basically continued, but the closures of the Omicron winter really impacted learning in 2021-22 — so much so that I don’t think it’s really fair to call it a recovery year. The amount of closures and quarantining and chronic absenteeism were too grave to say there was a huge amount of recovery, as opposed to just creeping back to normal. 

The school leaders I know are just beginning to contemplate what a full, normal year might look like, and is being framed accordingly. They’re very clear now — now — in saying that kids should be in school at all costs. In that way, Ifeel like public opinion and people’s experiences have evolved to the point that they’re ready to have this conversation. And I hope we do have it; I hope we don’t rush to saying, “Why aren’t you over that yet?” or, “There’s a huge achievement gap, why haven’t these kids caught up yet?” Like, let’s not forget what happened here.

So is it possible for 2022-23 to be the first post-COVID year? And what’s it going to take to make that happen?

I do think it’s possible. But in order for that to happen, we need to be clear-eyed about what has already happened. It’s a little frustrating to see schools lurching from crisis to crisis, and there’s a crisis rhetoric around schools that doesn’t always match reality. We’re hearing about a teacher shortage, for instance, but there were teacher shortages before the pandemic. And also, schools are listing a lot more vacancies; it’s not so much a shortage as schools trying to hire more people.

So there is a chance for recovery. In order for there to be recovery, schools need to do what they say they’re going to do in their [American Rescue Plan] plans and not lose sight of their responsibility to help the most vulnerable and the kids who lost out the most in this pandemic.

The premise of your book was that a year of learning was stolen; what needs to be done to restore what was lost?

You have to hear, without interrupting, what harm was suffered. You hear what kids went through. And then you try to give them back what they lost. That’s going to take time, but it can be done. A wonderful thing about children is that they have time, and the investment you make today will pay off many times in the future. We just need to give them that chance.

See previous 74 Interviews: Harvard economist Thomas Kane on reversing COVID learning loss, Seattle superintendent Susan Enfield on 700 days of learning disruptions, and Arizona assistant principal Beth Lehr on the pandemic’s effect on teachers. The full archive is here. 

Nationwide, reported infections are up 57% since two weeks ago and 4 percent of counties, including large clusters in the Northeast, are categorized as high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s . Another 14 percent are at the medium risk level.

Still, only are requiring students and staff to wear face coverings, according to the latest analysis from Burbio, a data service that has surveyed K-12 policies through the pandemic. 

An outlier, Pittsburgh Public Schools in Pennsylvania recently opted to less than two weeks after having made masks optional districtwide. And Portland, Maine on May 12 also , but clarified that it would not enforce the rule at end-of-year events like graduation and prom.

Much more common, school and health officials are announcing guidance that residents wear masks indoors as case counts rise, but have fallen short of issuing mandates. New York City leaders are residents to wear masks indoors, but the nation’s largest school district has made no changes to its face-covering policy thus far. The Cambridge, Massachusetts superintendent put forward a May 9, “​​encouraging our entire school community to mask, particularly when we are indoors,” but added that “we are NOT reinstating a requirement.”

“While a small number of districts are reinstating mask mandates, what we are seeing more often is district superintendents more forcefully recommending use of masks while not requiring them,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��.

Mia Miron, 13, is weeks from graduating middle school in Pomona, California. Recently, she’s noticed far more students and staff catching the virus, she said. 

Her friend in science class got infected. And the school called her to the cafeteria last week to notify her of a possible exposure in history class, though she has since tested negative for the virus. Los Angeles County, where Pomona Unified School District is located, has seen a 48% increase in cases over the last two weeks.

“This shot up out of nowhere,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Though the district does not require students or staff to wear face coverings, teachers in most classes now remind Miron and her peers that COVID is spreading and that they should mask up and frequently wash their hands, she said.

The eighth grader has worn a mask in school all year long and continues to now, but few of her classmates have heeded educators’ warnings, she said. 

“It’s kinda like 50-50” in terms of who wears face coverings in the classroom, she said.

Ameera Eshtewi, a Portland, Oregon high schooler who attends the Oregon Islamic Academy, a private school, said her school never dropped its universal face-covering requirement. She’s glad: mask-wearing gives her a “level of safety and security,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Across the country, reported pediatric COVID infection counts have steadily increased over the past month, but remain far below levels from the worst of the first Omicron surge. For the seven-day period ending May 12, the country reported about 94,000 youth cases compared to over 1.1 million over the same time span in late January, according to data from the .

On Tuesday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to Pfizer-BioNTech’s booster shots for children aged 5 to 11. The agency has hearings to review Moderna’s vaccines for children 5 and younger.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. surpasses the grim milestone of 1 million lives claimed by COVID, just of youth aged 12 to 17 and 28% of children 5 to 11 have received two vaccine doses. The latest wave of infection includes many people who have been both fully immunized and boosted, leading to a belief that schools cannot realistically take a zero-COVID approach to virus mitigation.

Still, masking requirements should return on a short-term basis in school districts where virus risk is high, believes Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University. He serves on an advisory panel for his children’s Brookline, Massachusetts school system and advocated for a temporary reimplementation of universal masking, though on May 11 officials instead opted to “,” but not require, face coverings.

“Unless we’re willing to say, ‘That’s it, we’re 100% done, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to mitigate [COVID spread],’ — and I’m not ready to say that — … then we’re at a point where we should be using masks,” he told ����Ӱ��.

The doctor, who was among the first in his liberal suburb to advocate for off-ramps from mask mandates earlier in the spring, added that “once-in-a-lifetime, big events, where interacting with humans and walking around and seeing each other smiling is mission critical to what the event is,” such as prom, should not enforce face-covering rules.

His stance on classroom masking comes less out of concern for curbing community spread, he explained, and more for a desire to keep students from missing school. Face coverings reduce virus transmission in K-12 settings, multiple academic studies have demonstrated, which can prevent young people from quarantine. 

“The reason we want people to wear masks is to protect our own education, now” while cases are up, said Linas.

They included ninth graders who didn’t earn any credits in their first semester and those who should have been in 10th grade, but were out of school for a year.

“You don’t normally refer younger kids to dropout recovery,” Franco said. “Some of them are like, ‘What’s a credit?’” 

Those students who were held back are among the reasons Texas saw a 9% increase in its freshman class this year, more than four times the state’s annual growth rate prior to the pandemic. 

That pattern has been demonstrated in more than a dozen states, according to enrollment data compiled by Burbio, an information services company, and shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��.

The new data, from 35 states and the District of Columbia, adds to the complicated picture of students’ comings and goings during the COVID era. With many young children who delayed pre-K and kindergarten during school closures now flooding back into the education system, an enrollment surge in the early grades was expected. But 15 states and D.C. saw growth in ninth grade of at least 5% compared to 2020-21, and in a few states, including New Mexico and North Carolina, the increase in freshmen far outpaced that of kindergartners. 

While the return of families to public schools contributed to growth in ninth grade this year, retention rates have nearly doubled in some states and districts, and educators don’t expect next year to be much better. 

“We’re a generation that’s going to have people with two-year holes in their education,” said Jeffrey Cole, principal at Winston County High, a rural Alabama school about midway between Huntsville and Birmingham.

If freshmen only fail two quarters, Cole usually moves them on to 10th grade. But for the first time in his 19 years as principal, he has students failing all four quarters. He thinks they should have stayed in eighth grade. Across the state, enrollment in ninth grade has jumped at a much higher rate than before the pandemic.

Districts often see a “bulge” in freshman year when students don’t pass enough classes to move on, said Eric Wearne, director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, outside Atlanta. But he added it’s not a surprise COVID disruptions and remote learning made matters much worse.

“Students were in ninth grade,” he said, “and the COVID situation was so tough that more of them than usual didn’t earn enough credits to be considered 10^th graders yet.”

Retention data in some states and districts back that up. Figures from last fall show that 18% of ninth graders in the Houston Independent School District repeated the year, significantly higher than the district’s pre-pandemic rate of 10%. And in North Carolina, more than 16% of last year’s freshman class was retained — roughly double the rate of past years. District officials from rural Maryland to Albuquerque, New Mexico, also saw higher retention rates this year.

The majority of states where ninth grade enrollment surpassed 5% are concentrated in the South, where they have “well-defined promotion criteria” for freshmen, such as end-of-course exams, explained Robert Balfanz, who directs the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. Such policies were widely implemented in the early 2000s at the start of the accountability-driven No Child Left Behind era, but have since been suspended in many states.

What hasn’t changed, he said, is that students still need to earn enough credits to graduate.

“It’s the long tail of the pandemic,” he said. “This will impact graduation rates three years from now.”

He added that during remote learning, high school students were more likely to have assignments without live instruction and had to “self-manage getting the work done.” With many high schools canceling orientation in the fall of 2020, he said rising ninth graders might not have fully understood the consequences of failing a class.

‘Fell off the radar’

The retention increase is one example of how the pandemic has altered existing patterns that enrollment forecasters use to help districts plan for the future. In his work with school districts, Jerry Oelerich, a senior analyst at the consulting company Flo-Analytics, accounts for the fact that 2007 — when most of this year’s ninth graders were born — was a for births. That alone, however, doesn’t fully explain the big increases some states are seeing in ninth grade, Oelerich said. 

Private school enrollment and also grew last year. But students often return to traditional high schools to play sports. And many parents decide they’re not cut out to teach high schoolers. 

“Their expertise kind of runs out,” said Kent Martin, a senior analyst at Flo-Analytics and a former teacher and administrator in Washington state. “You really need to be a content expert, like a teacher.”

Ronn Nozoe, CEO at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said it makes sense that with schools predominantly open this year, families who opted for private schools would return and “save their money.”

“There are a lot of kids who fell off the radar,” Nozoe said. “If you’re going to move back in, you want to start that in ninth — not 10th, 11th or 12th.”

That’s what Virginia mother Kate O’Harra decided after she pulled her son Jack Mulhall out of the Loudoun County district last year and enrolled him in Stride (formerly K12), a national network of virtual schools, for eighth grade. 

“He didn’t do terrible,” even though O’Harra, a pilates instructor, and her husband, an IT professional, weren’t always available to help him with schoolwork. When schools closed, Jack was on his way to overcoming some of the scatteredness that comes with his ADHD. But the district’s remote learning program, which O’Harra described as “a complete and utter failure,” interrupted that progress.

“We were in a good place pre-COVID. Now it’s all over the map.”

The affluent suburb has been at the center of several over the rights of transgender students and the use of so-called “critical race theory.” But Jack’s desire to return to school with his friends and her wish for a normal school structure convinced O’Harra to return to the district for ninth grade.

Still, the move hasn’t solved everything for Jack, now at Woodgrove High School. 

“We went into 9^th grade very unprepared,” said his mother, adding that after a year of remote learning, he struggles with some social cues, like not knowing how to take a joke. 

Jack said his only contact with friends during eighth grade was playing “Call of Duty,” and the one person he met virtually through Stride was his math teacher. He’s still missing some organizational skills and fell behind in Spanish and earth science. He’ll start next year with a tutor.

“I didn’t really have assignments for science [in eighth grade]. I was left drifting without any knowledge,” he said. But back in a traditional school, Jack plays football and lacrosse and said, “I can actually see and talk to my teachers in real life.” 

Nationwide in Stride dropped slightly this year — down to 187,000 from 189,400 last year, but still well above the pre-pandemic figure of about 123,000. 

Virtual programs are another reason some district’s ninth grade classes are swelling. The Mecklenburg County Public Schools in Virginia, a rural district not far from the North Carolina state line, offered a virtual option through Stride so parents still concerned about COVID wouldn’t withdraw their children to homeschool and the district wouldn’t lose funding. 

The virtual program boosted ninth grade enrollment from 337 in 2020-21 to 609 this year. But Superintendent Paul Nichols has regrets and suggested that remote instruction shares some of the blame for students veering off track.

“We will offer no virtual education options for students next year,” he said. “We are concerned that most of them have not completed much, if any, actual academic work.”

A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, new data shows that many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Whether families withdrew to enroll their children in online charters, school them at home or fled to far-flung suburbs with more affordable housing, the pandemic has triggered population shifts that could change the composition of U.S. school districts for years to come.

Data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends, offers the first look at the degree to which states and districts have recovered from a punishing year of lockdown and remote learning. Out of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared to 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%.

Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. “Parents were making these enrollment decisions last summer. There was still a great deal of uncertainty. Parents wanted stability for their kids.”

shows that last year’s losses were concentrated in the early grades. Those who opted not to enroll their young children in public schools last year, or found an in-person option somewhere else, might never return for middle or high school, Dee said. 

While enrollment in many of the nation’s urban districts was already shrinking before the pandemic, school closures and economic upheaval forced many families to make decisions they might have put off otherwise.

Barring further pandemic disruptions, student population trends will likely return to their pre-COVID pace, Dee said, but added, “The effects of the sharp, recent enrollment declines may be long-lived. The fiscal consequences will remain for some while.”

New York experienced the sharpest decline, a 2% drop — more than 48,000 students — since last year. That’s on top of the previous year’s 3% decline. Enrollment in Florida saw the biggest bounce at 4%, or more than 111,000 additional students — a reflection of higher birth rates, job growth and fewer COVID restrictions under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, experts say. 

Of the 10 largest districts in the nation, only Florida’s Orange and Hillsborough counties, home to Orlando and Tampa respectively, saw enrollment surpass pre-pandemic figures.

“Florida was continuing to grow when other states came to a plateau,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist from the University of South Florida. “Things were open and you could still work.”

State data offers a glimpse of what will likely be further enrollment growth in Arizona, Florida and Utah — states with more affordable housing, growing tech sectors and outdoor living that became an important draw during COVID. At the same time, fewer people are moving to the Northeast from other states and countries, citing . 

District-level figures — provided exclusively by Burbio to ����Ӱ�� — offer a richer picture of what happened to students after the pandemic began. The data, combined with state-level reports and interviews with district officials and parents, shows many urban districts lost students to growing exurbs. And some districts with no population growth added thousands of students in virtual schools.

Districts with enrollment loss could face tough decisions about layoffs and school closures in the near future. Meanwhile, smaller districts that are rapidly gaining students are struggling to hire staff and preserve the kind of close-knit environment that drew many parents in the first place.

“The pandemic kind of accelerated some of those pre-existing trends,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a think tank. While school closures forced many parents to look for other options, housing and rental prices were also pushing families out of major metro regions. “All you have to do is go to Zillow and see the year-over-year changes,” he said.

In December 2019, Tanner and Miranda McCutchan relocated from northern California to Boise, Idaho — one of 10 metro areas that saw the most growth between 2020 and 2021, according to recent . That leaves two fewer children who will enter California’s schools in the coming years. Miranda stays home with 4-year-old Paige, who attends a Montessori preschool, and 18-month-old Emery, while her husband runs a glass company. 

“We couldn’t afford a house where we lived,” she said. “It was keep renting or move somewhere we could buy a place.”

The fiscal cliff & ‘Armageddon’

In California, Burbio collected data only from Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. All three saw declines, due in part to California’s high-priced . With the state’s school-age population expected to keep over the next decade, district leaders are bracing for a to their budgets.

The Oakland Unified Public Schools offers a preview of what other districts with declining enrollment and birth rates will soon confront — the painful and unpopular decision to close schools. In February, the district, which saw a 5.6% enrollment decline compared to last year, decided it would over the next two years. Four others will merge or reduce grade levels.

In the Granite School District, near Salt Lake City, enrollment fell 2.4%, down to 60,371 this year, even though the state’s overall enrollment is up. 

The district has seen a decline in birth rates and an increase in families fleeing to “cheaper areas to build larger homes within [Salt Lake County],” said Benjamin Horsley, chief of staff for the district, adding officials anticipate “leveling out around 55,000 students.” The district has already closed three schools and expects to shutter 10 to 14 more in the next five to seven years. 

Districts experiencing similar losses should have been making those tough calls before the pandemic, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

“Federal [relief] money is delaying it a year or two, and the fact that state budgets are healthy is delaying it a year or two,” she said about closing schools. Roza advises a network of over 40 urban districts nationwide, the majority of which are shrinking. “Federal money will run out, and enrollment for some of them isn’t isn’t going to come back. These cost factors are going to just slam down on people.”

Los Angeles Unified, for example, saw a 5.9% decline this year and is expected to by fall of 2023. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Monday that he’s not yet considering closing schools, but added that at the end of his first 100 days — in about two more months — he will discuss “technical corrections” and “belt tightening” measures to respond to the loss of students. 

He agrees with Roza about the dangers of the approaching fiscal cliff, and didn’t mince words about what would happen to the district if it didn’t turn enrollment trends around by the time federal relief funds dry up in 2024. “Armageddon,” he said. Then he added, “It’s going to be a hurricane of massive proportions.” 

The student population in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, began dropping about five years ago. Superintendent Jesus Jara attributes much of the decline to the growth of charter schools. 

“The anti-charter discussion — that was in the ‘90s. They’re not going away,” Jara said. “The discussion is how are we more flexible and how we are more agile for our communities.” 

Despite declining enrollment, the district needs to build and renovate 33 schools to better serve its current population, he said. That includes breaking up some large, 4,000-student high schools to offer more “boutique” and career-focused programs to compete with charters.

‘Has not slowed down’

Districts with falling enrollment are strategizing how to keep the students they have. But accelerated growth comes with its own challenges, Roza said, putting pressure on leaders to act fast, especially if they need to recruit staff amid a nationwide hiring shortage. Schools might be “digging deeper and deeper into applicant pools” and not necessarily choosing the best candidates, she said. 

Liberty Hill Independent School District, northwest of Austin, Texas, didn’t lose students during the pandemic. Enrollment, at 5,539 last year, is now over 6,800 — a 23% percent leap. It’s a bedroom community that just got its first H-E-B, a “big box” grocery store, and is conveniently located near a toll road with easy access to Apple’s new complex near Austin. 

During the pandemic, the community “actually saw a 40 percent rise in residential home builds, and it has not slowed down,” said Superintendent Steven Snell. The district has eight schools now and will open a ninth next year. 

Parents value the district’s small-town atmosphere and the sense that educators know their families well, he said — connections that could be hard to maintain as the district adds 1,000 students a year. Meanwhile, the district has raised salaries for substitutes because of shortages, and there’s a scarcity of available bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers.

“When you have a salary that is causing you to live paycheck to paycheck, you’re going to jump ship for a little more money to survive,” Snell said.

Many of the enrollment swings this year reflect the success of online programs in meeting the needs of families for consistency amid the pandemic’s many disruptions.

For some virtual charters, the enrollment spike was temporary. Oklahoma’s Epic One on One, an online program, had 17,106 students in 2019-20. Enrollment roughly doubled last year and is now down to 23,156, according to state data.  

“Many parents decided to enroll their student in Epic once the pandemic hit, but it appears that trend has slowed with this year’s enrollment numbers,” said Carrie Burkhart, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Education.

But whether parents are concerned about COVID or found that online school better suits their children, virtual programs remain in high demand. 

South Carolina’s enrollment has increased almost 2%, due in part to “skyrocketing enrollment in virtual charters,” said Ryan Brown, spokesman for the state’s education department.

The student population in the Huntsville Independent School District, about an hour north of Houston, shot up 40% this year because it operates the Texas Online Preparatory School. And in Colorado, Harrison School District 2, near Colorado Springs, began a partnership with The Vanguard School, a virtual program and one of three charter systems affiliated with the district.

“Many might see it as a public school district versus charter battle,” said Harrison Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel. “We believe this makes us stronger and responds to the needs of the community.”

Homeschooling trends

While Burbio data offers an incomplete picture of where lost students have gone, others have been trying to fill in the missing pieces. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey showed that homeschooling jumped from about 5% of households to the fall after the pandemic began. By the start of this school year, it had settled back down to about 7%, according to August 2021 data.

Others have left for more established private schools. Michelle Walker, an Oregon mother who became an advocate for school reopening last year, withdrew her daughter from the Canby Public Schools, near Portland. She secured a spot — and financial aid — at a private school for fourth-grader MacKenzie. She also took out a loan and received money from family to help cover tuition.

“I drive 80 miles roundtrip every day to make sure she goes to a good school,” she said. “It would take a lot for me to put her back in public schools.”

shows many other parents are following suit. According to Burbio, most districts in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, and nearby Clackamas County have seen enrollment declines this year. 

Some district leaders are still hoping to lure back students they’ve lost. The Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, serves families in Pueblo and Hispanic communities, including many in multi-family households concerned about COVID risk. 

The district was the last in the state to lift its mask mandate. Superintendent Matt Montaño said he’s encouraged that enrollment, while still below pre-pandemic figures, has picked up slightly since last year. 

The district’s pre-K program, with 190 students at three schools, earned a five-star rating from the state education department — an accomplishment Montaño hopes will help recruit new students.

“Once we get them in our doors,” he said, “there’s no reason why they should leave us.”

In 2019, the Arizona mother of two sent her older daughter off to kindergarten in Scottsdale, Ariz.’s Cave Creek Unified School District.

But after Mac Ban saw the district’s tepid response to the pandemic, she started home-schooling her at taxpayer expense. Arizona’s publicly funded now underwrites her kids’ education. 

Similar scholarship accounts could soon do the same for millions of other students nationwide as a new raft of proposed laws makes its way through state legislative sessions this month, buoyed by parent anger at district policies. 

Mac Ban balked at homeschooling at first, envisioning herself isolated and sitting at home with her kids for most of the week. But the more she learned, the more attractive it seemed. After she disenrolled her daughter from a district school and applied for the ESA, the child began learning lessons from the “classical Christian” . Her total bill comes to about $200 per month. 

School choice advocates see hope in stories like these. As the omicron variant continues to wreak havoc on schools’ normal procedures and parents lose patience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — advocates hope that more parents like Mac Ban will insist that taxpayers help pay for their kids’ educations outside of neighborhood public schools. 

School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the power structure of public schooling. That coalition has weakened over the past few years. But scholars such as Paul Peterson, who directs Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, now see an opening. 

“A couple of years ago, there was a feeling in the country that opposition to school choice was on the rise,” he told attendees at a at Harvard. “Some of the coalition and backing for school choice was eroding and the movement, perhaps, was breaking down. But in light of the pandemic, there is a contrary feeling emerging in the country today: We are finding the passage of new school choice legislation in states across the country, new tax credit programs, new education savings accounts programs, expanded charter school programs. There’s a lot of interest in opening up to parents opportunities that haven’t existed in the past.” 

While culture war issues like critical race theory could upend that coalition once again, the mood at Harvard was one of optimism. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now chairs the nonprofit reform group , pointed to recent legislative successes in Missouri, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things, so it’s all good. And I don’t see it going away. I really don’t.” 

Choice advocates got an unexpected boost in November when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in increasingly purple Virginia, beating establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe by . Youngkin pulled off the surprisingly solid victory in part by tapping into parents’ anger about public education, giving a voice to thousands who felt schools haven’t risen to the challenge of basic education during the pandemic. McAuliffe, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, didn’t help his case during the campaign when, discussing over anti-racist education, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

Derrell Bradford, president of the education advocacy group , told attendees at the Harvard conference that McAuliffe’s mistake was displaying “just a complete and utter tone-deafness” to parents’ experiences. “After a year-and-a-half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ‘Parents don’t matter.’ You can make it a school choice lesson, but there’s a lesson there about treating people poorly who’ve been treated poorly.”

Republican strategists such as Christopher Rufo, who last year the raucous campaign to fight critical race theory, now talks of families’  public schools that don’t sync with their beliefs. 

As the omicron variant dominates and infection rates , vaccine requirements for even the youngest children could anger parents further. And while many parents have fought for a return to , others are clamoring for remote options amid the recent surge: Recent polls find that about six in 10 parents of school-aged children favor virtual learning.

For the past year or more, parents have been voting with their feet: Public schools have shed millions of students, recent data show. In New York City, the nation’s largest system, 50,000 fewer students attended last fall than two years earlier, The New York Times — a 4.5 percent decline. 

Chicago Public Schools in October had lost about 10,000 students over the past school year, a 3 percent drop. Overall enrollment was students over two years. 

Across California, the nation’s most populous state, educators are awaiting updated figures, but estimated enrollment has dropped since 2018-19 by about nearly 184,000 students, or about 3 percent, CalMatters earlier this month.

A Tyton Partners issued in July found that since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 17.5 percent of children have switched schools at least once, 75 percent more than in average years. And nearly 80 percent of parents said they’d be “more active in shaping their child’s education” in the future. 

At the Harvard conference, Bradford said school closures during the pandemic in 2020 suddenly brought the system’s failures into “high and broad relief” for 60 million families — especially families of color and low-income families.

“If you are a Black kid in New York City, you were the least important person in America for the last two years,” he said. “And if you were a teacher in that system, you were the most important person in America during that time. And we made it very clear and explicit that that was the case. We have a system that is built upon that foundation, with those priorities. And it couldn’t get the majority of kids reading proficiently before the pandemic.”

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, said she actually expected “a far higher percentage of families” to opt out of their neighborhood schools, given fears about COVID and “the volatile debates about safety protocols” over the past two years. 

That a mass exodus didn’t happen, she added, “says to me that families are valuing public schools and what a good public school is for: academics, of course, but [also] as centers of communities, where kids eat healthy meals, access health care, and find social and emotional supports.”

For her part, Weingarten has pushed to “have a different conversation” about school choice, one focused on what has worked in private settings during the pandemic — but that also treats public schools less as a commodity that families can buy than as a public good.

“We’re experiencing a crisis in our democracy in which our public schools have a really important role,” she said. “Why not try to figure out how to make this year, regardless of where we are, a year of recovery and revival for our kids and not have a year of winners and losers?”

As 2022 progresses, that seems unlikely.

EdChoice’s director of national research, Michael McShane, that since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen states have created or expanded school choice programs. The group now says enacted seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones. Robert Enlow, the group’s CEO, called 2021 “without a doubt” for school choice since EdChoice has been tracking it. 

In an interview, McShane said that until recently he was expecting upcoming state legislative sessions in 2022 to be “pretty quiet” on topics like school choice. “I think now that there is going to be a lot going on.” 

Part of the reason may be the billions in COVID relief funds that school districts have received to keep them afloat, he said: “In politics, things happen easier when there’s a bunch of money sloshing around.”

On the one hand, the money softens the blow of all of the student departures — but it also makes it harder for school districts to complain to state lawmakers about the effects of often small choice programs that draw students out of the public system. “This program that’s spending $25 million across the entire state, how can you possibly have a problem with it when you just got $2 billion from the feds?” he said.

As legislative sessions begin in several states, choice is on lawmakers’ minds. In Kentucky last week, lawmakers an expanded school choice bill that would give families tuition assistance for private education.

In Missouri, lawmakers last year approved a tax credit to fund a private-school tuition education savings account, and lawmakers are now pushing to the program before it even takes effect. They’ve proposed lifting a $25 million funding cap and dropping requirements that families who participate live in a city with at least 30,000 residents.

Youngkin, just a few days into his term in Virginia, backed a GOP-led effort in the narrowly divided state legislature that would the number of charter schools from fewer than 10 to about 200. The bill would allow the state Board of Education to create regional charter school “divisions” with the power to approve new charter schools, despite opposition from localities. 

Higher graduation rates … or winning the culture war?

Concerns about parents’ role in their kids’ education played a “huge role” in Youngkin’s Virginia election victory, McShane said, but more broadly, parents “want to be back to normal now. And the fact that things aren’t back to normal is leading to a lot of discontent.”

Whether from rolling quarantines, mask or vaccine mandates, he said, “I think all of this stuff is just going to continue to roil schools, and you’re going to have people that just want out — they don’t want their school’s vaccine policy to be set by 51 percent of their neighbors. They’re going to want to have the option to go to a school where it’s decided at the school level.” 

Whether the current push for school choice plays out in both blue and red states, however, remains an open question. 

Most of the recent legislation has prevailed in reliably Republican-controlled legislatures, even if a few of the with the endorsement of a Democratic governors, as in West Virginia — or despite a governor’s veto, as in Kentucky.

In reliably blue Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was elected in 2018, campaigned on a promise to slash funding for a . But once he was elected, “he actually signed a bill to strengthen it modestly,” said Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools.

“It seems to be one these classic cases where it’s easy to say anything when you’re running for office, but when you get into office, you find out voters have an interest in the program you want to eliminate — you start to change your mind about it a little bit,” he said. “So he backed off.” 

But these days, Richmond said, even private Catholic school parents are talking about exercising their right to leave schools over concerns about so-called critical race theory or enforcing mask and vaccine mandates — the latter two are required by an executive order signed by Pritzker, and also apply to private school students. 

“Some people got very mad and wrote to me: ‘We should be fighting this [mandate]. This is tyranny. This is against God — this is Satan. If you don’t change it, I’m going to pull my kids out of your school and send them to public schools,’” Richmond recalled. “I was like, ‘What? That makes no sense.’”

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that these parents “were paying tuition in order to avoid that stuff.”

The trend toward ideological reasons for opting out is worrying for the larger school choice community, said Richmond, who from 2005 to 2019 was CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He was also the founding chairman of the Illinois State Charter School Commission.

A decade ago, he said, “you could get bipartisan support for statements like, ‘Parents ought to be able to choose from a range of options that best meet the needs of their kids.’ Now conservatives aren’t saying stuff like that anymore. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to do this to save America from the Satanic clutch of CRT.’”

The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” he said. It’s “choice in pursuit of winning the culture war.”

That risks alienating politically moderate or left-leaning teachers and parents who would otherwise support choice. If the only politicians who support school choice also happen to be hard-right culture warriors, “,” or Trump supporters, “that might be an Achilles heel of all this,” he said.

‘Every kid is unique’

Mac Ban, the Phoenix mother, said part of her decision to homeschool actually revolved around what she saw as a social justice sensibility creeping into the district — she has heard examples of math word problems that included references to white subjects stealing from Black subjects. Mac Ban said such ideas are “not appropriate for an elementary school student.”

Young children, she said, “need to learn the basics. They need to learn the fundamental things, and they need to learn to think on their own, to think critically, not be told that they are an oppressor.”

Mac Ban, a first-generation American — her family came to the U.S. from Communist-controlled Poland in the 1970s — said she was able to qualify for Arizona’s ESA because her younger daughter had an individualized education plan due to a diagnosed speech delay. Simply being in the same family qualified her older sister, the kindergartner, for ESA funds as well.

Her initial concern that she and her kids would be isolated quickly passed when they joined the Highlands Latin community. “By homeschooling, I don’t mean that I’m just sitting here with my daughters every day and we don’t see anyone …We do all kinds of group lessons, activities. I’m never home. We’re always out and about, doing different things,” she said.

Mac Ban likes having the ability to choose what lessons and subjects her daughter — now a second-grader — pursues.

“Every kid is unique, and the parents know what’s best for their child, ultimately,” she said.

With a of over 1 million daily COVID cases reported on Monday and more than this week temporarily closed or pivoted to remote instruction, educators and families are being thrust back into the existential struggle over keeping schools open.

The second half of the 2021-22 school year began with a growing list of shutdowns, including major urban districts such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Cleveland. In Philadelphia, leaders on Monday night announced that on Tuesday, though stopped short of shutting down the entire district.

Other top school systems such as New York City and Chicago have moved forward with plans to reopen in person, but have hit snags along the way: In New York, nearly a third of students did not show up for classes on Monday, and in Chicago, a late night vote Tuesday held by the teachers union demanding to teach remotely Wednesday.

The reactions from weary parents ranged widely. “It’s chaos,” National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues The New York Times, pointing out that when schools nix plans for in-person learning at the final hour, it leaves families scrambling for child care options. 

On the other hand, with the Omicron variant rampant post-holiday, Cleveland parent Tiffany Rossman was glad schools stayed closed to start the new year. She and her teenage daughter both tested positive for the virus in December, and she fell quite ill despite her vaccination, she told ����Ӱ��. The mother worried that opening classrooms after the holidays could lead to infected kids spreading the virus.

Rossman acknowledged, however, that “if I had small children and needed to go into the office then I don’t know what I would do.”

While a handful of school systems had planned before the winter break to be remote for short stints in January or to close for testing, the vast majority of announcements were made last minute as record-high COVID case rates came into view. Yonkers Public Schools started classes this week remotely after of students who took rapid tests over the holidays were COVID positive. Detroit announced that school would be closed Monday through Wednesday after rapid testing revealed a positivity rate. Districts are open for in-person learning in and , but officials there had to shut down eight and 12 school buildings, respectively, for lack of staff.

“A lot of it was last second, and it continues to be,” Dennis Roche, co-founder of the K-12 data tracker Burbio, told ����Ӱ��.

The , and school systems are exceptions to the trend, he noted, as each district had planned before the holidays to take a handful of days in the new year for students to receive rapid tests. As it currently stands, classrooms are set to open in all three districts in the coming days. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, does not re-open until Jan. 10, but has said it intends to test all students before it does.

Over the weekend, Roche watched Burbio’s jump from 1,591 to 2,181, and again on Tuesday to 3,556. Shutdowns were concentrated in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, where current COVID rates are among the .

Amid the chaos, the Biden administration has maintained that schools should keep their doors open wherever possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended booster eligibility to two separate groups of children this week.

“I believe schools should remain open,” the president said during a on the current Omicron surge. And in fact, despite some conspicuous closures, the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 98,000 public schools have returned from the holiday break in person. 

Hedging slightly in a conversation on Fox News Sunday, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona added: “We recognize there may be some bumps in the road, especially this upcoming week when superintendents, who are working really hard across the country, are getting calls saying that some of their schools may have 5 to 10 percent of their staff not available.”

“For anyone who has gone remote, we want to similarly keep on engaging with them, and make sure that they can come back as quickly as they can,” a senior White House official told ����Ӱ�� Tuesday.

Federal policymakers underscore that districts can draw on American Rescue Plan dollars as well as multiple other devoted to helping K-12 facilities stave off COVID through purchasing tests and other mitigation measures.

To help schools stay open, the CDC in December endorsed “test-to-stay” practices allowing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus to remain in the classroom if they test negative for COVID. 

The federal agency also took the controversial step on Dec. 27 of reducing its recommended quarantine timeline for infected individuals, including teachers and students, from 10 to five days. The move divided many health experts, leaving numerous observers to wonder whether the CDC was after .

But several school officials appreciated the chance for teachers and students to return more quickly to the buildings.

“Anything that will help the schools to stay open is welcome,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told ����Ӱ��.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high. But top infectious disease experts say that the vast majority of serious infections are among unvaccinated youth. Under a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the .

​​“Most of our pediatric population is still undervaccinated,” said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Even though the Omicron variant has generated more breakthrough infections, the pediatrician assured that the vaccines continue to be successful at their key function: preventing severe illness and death.

“We’re still so much safer having received the vaccine,” she told ����Ӱ��.

For youth who have received both shots and are ready for a booster, the Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for , five months after the initial two-dose series.

Amid the widespread concern and flurry of new pandemic policies, a bit of good news regarding the giant spike in cases also surfaced on Sunday. In South Africa, where the Omicron variant was first identified, the surge in infections driven by the hyper-transmissible strain has , giving health experts hope that the U.S may follow a similar course in the weeks to come.

Still, other mutations of the virus may arise further down the road, Deeter pointed out. The only long-term path to move beyond the pandemic, she said, is getting immunized.

“If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s going to come through vaccination.”

In what may be a national first, New Mexico issued a requiring that all school staff receive coronavirus booster shots or submit to weekly testing.

The state was already enforcing a vaccinate-or-test rule for K-12 workers and other state employees, but due to concern surrounding the recently identified Omicron variant, the state announced that it will require school staff to up their immunity with an extra shot of the vaccine by Jan. 17, 2022. 

Booster shots, infectious disease specialists believe, are the against the new strain.

“We recognize the gravity of the situation,” Nora Sackett, press secretary for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, told ����Ӱ��. “For folks who are fully vaccinated, they are now required to get their booster shot, if they’re eligible.”

As of Nov. 29, 85 percent of school staff had been fully vaccinated, according to the state Public Education Department. K-12 employees who are unvaccinated, or who have two doses but choose not to receive a third, must undergo weekly testing for the virus, she explained. If staff are non-compliant with the testing regimen, individual school districts will decide on repercussions. 

Only about 9 percent of school staff reported having received a booster shot as of Dec. 7, meaning the vast majority of vaccinated K-12 employees still must submit documentation of a third dose by Jan. 17 in order to avoid the state’s weekly testing regimen.

Outside of schools, the order requires third doses with no testing opt-out for New Mexico’s health care workers. It’s the first booster mandate in the nation that the data team behind the has identified.

“We haven’t seen it anywhere else,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��. 

While numerous districts, including Chicago, gave teachers a day off to get their third shots, he said, “we have not seen [boosters] mandated until we saw it in New Mexico.” 

Sackett, also, said she was not aware of any other states having such a policy on the books.

The published by the governor’s office includes multiple paragraphs outlining the threats posed by the Omicron variant, which seem to have motivated the announcement.  The new COVID strain has been detected in at least , with cases continuing to increase, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

In late November, the World Health Organization named the Omicron strain a “variant of concern” just days after it was first identified. Its high number of mutations — including more than the Delta strain on the protein used to latch onto cells — raises alarm for officials. But scientists have yet to determine whether the new version of the virus is indeed more transmissible or better able to evade the protections provided by existing vaccines. More clarity will arrive in the , experts say. For now, the Delta variant remains the dominant coronavirus strain in the U.S. and is responsible for the vast majority of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

The CDC last Monday on booster doses to recommend that all adults “should,” rather than “may,” receive a third shot six months after their second. A day later, Pfizer CEO and Chairman Albert Bourla announced that his pharmaceutical company from the Food and Drug Administration to extend eligibility for third doses to 16- and 17-year olds.

Alarm over possible threats from the Omicron strain may be translating into more demand for coronavirus immunizations. On Thursday, nearly doses were administered, according to CDC data, a level not seen since late May.

It remains unclear, however, who exactly has been rolling up their sleeves. Counts published by the American Academy of Pediatrics indicate that the number of youth getting vaccinated against the coronavirus had in the seven-day period ending Dec. 1, but the nationwide spike in doses has mostly come after that window.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced a spate of new policies designed to enhance school safety and boost youth vaccination rates. He introduced measures including the and a requirement that Medicaid pay health care providers for vaccine consultations with families. 

“​​We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” said the president.

Biden also indicated that the CDC would soon release updated guidance on “test-to-stay” programs for schools that allow students potentially exposed to the virus to avoid quarantine if they test negative before the school day. This fall, the practice has grown increasingly popular nationwide as schools seek to keep healthy students learning in person. Test-to-stay schemes would likely expand further should the federal government recommend their implementation.

In California, the state that so far has taken the most aggressive approach to vaccinating its public school students, a federal appeals court on Sunday delivered a win to San Diego Unified School District, against the implementation of its student COVID immunization mandate. Students 16 and up in the state’s second-largest school system will have until Dec. 20 to receive their second vaccine doses if they wish to attend school in person after Jan. 24, when the policy is set to take effect. 

“This latest decision recognizes that we have both the responsibility to protect students and the authority to do so by implementing a vaccine mandate, which is really our best hope as a country to get this deadly disease under control,” Board President Richard Barrera said in a statement.

The case, however, may be ongoing according to Paul Jonna, the attorney representing the lawsuit’s plaintiff, a 16-year-old high school junior who sued the district over its mandate in October, citing religious objections.

“We will seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible,” Jonna said in a statement.

More than eligible San Diego students are fully vaccinated, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. 

Just north in Los Angeles, where a student immunization rule will also soon go into effect, the district published figures Nov. 22 showing that of eligible youth had received at least one coronavirus shot or were medically exempt. L.A. Unified’s mandate applies to all students ages 12 and up.

California is also the only state in the nation to adopt a statewide student COVID mandate, which will likely kick in next school year. But already, a small district in San Diego County has said that it will allow unvaccinated students to continue learning in separate, off-campus buildings, .

“For whatever reason, if the parent chooses not to vaccinate [their child], I still believe that a student deserves every opportunity to reach their potential,” schools Superintendent Rich Newman said.

On the other side of the country, New York City will up the stakes on vaccination even for its youngest residents, requiring restaurants and movie theaters by Dec. 14 to of children ages 5 to 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday.

Back in New Mexico, bracing for the possible threats of the Omicron variant, acting Health Secretary David Scrase shared his reasoning on the state’s new booster requirement.

“New Mexico isn’t an island,” he said, “and we can’t prevent the new variant from arriving here. So we must defend ourselves with the tools we know to work.”

Even before the World Health Organization labeled the Omicron coronavirus strain a new “variant of concern” Friday, school closures were continuing to increase across the country. 

Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons including teacher burnout, staffing shortages and virus outbreaks, according to counts from Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic. Since the start of the academic year, nationwide have added extra days off.

The numbers suggest that nearly 10 percent of the nation’s roughly 98,000 K-12 schools have experienced closures this year. In Maryland, more than 3 in 10 schools have been affected by at least one day of disruption this academic year. In North Carolina, where such events have been most frequent, the number is above 4 in 10.

Now, schools already struggling to keep classrooms open could face further challenges should the recently identified Omicron variant, which has already , fuel a COVID surge this winter. 

“This is only going to make matters worse,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, told ����Ӱ��. “We already see that most districts are short-handed.”

Earlier in November, lack of substitute teachers forced multiple large school systems to announce unplanned closures as teachers took additional time off around Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

Shutting down is a last-resort option that schools should seek to avoid, said Domenech. But sometimes it’s school leaders’ only viable choice, he said.

“If they have a staff that’s on the verge of burnout and they keep pushing them, they’re only going to lose more staff. And that’s going to result in more closures and fewer kids being in person.”

Now, with K-12 staff stretched thin in districts across the country, health experts are scrambling to understand the threat posed by the new variant, which Moderna’s President Dr. Stephen Hoge described as having a “” of mutations. 

In South Africa, where Omicron was first identified Nov. 24, the strain has contributed to a sharp spike in cases, leading doctors to believe that it is more transmissible than previous versions of the virus. But whether those cases are more severe, and exactly how much protection is delivered by the vaccines, remains unclear. 

The South African doctor who first discovered the variant told the BBC on Sunday that symptoms have generally been “.” But other experts point out that these initial observations are only based on a very small sample size.

“This variant is a cause for concern, not a cause for panic,” said President Joe Biden in an address to the nation Monday morning.

Health experts, the president said, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, believe that existing COVID vaccines will continue to provide a degree of protection against the new strain, especially for individuals who have upped their immunity through booster shots. But it will be before scientists gain more precise results on just how effectively antibodies built up through vaccination neutralize the Omicron variant, Dr. Kavita Patel, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told CNBC on Monday. Still, there’s reason to be hopeful, she said.

“The current vaccines don’t just generate the variant-specific antibodies. They try to generate kind of a broad antibody response,” said the Washington, D.C.-based physician.

Because of the Omicron variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday on booster doses to recommend that all adults “should,” rather than “may,” receive a third shot six months after their second. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported Monday evening that Pfizer-BioNTech plans to for 16- and 17-year olds, after initial booster data out of Israel showed positive results within that age group.

While the details of the new variant come into focus, Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu said K-12 buildings need to keep their guard up to stave off in-school transmission.

“It’s important for schools to continue protective measures such as masking, hand washing, physical distancing when possible, disinfecting, optimizing ventilation, etc. to limit the spread of COVID-19,” the doctor wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

At this point, Domenech said he is not aware of any school leaders within his network having changed their safety procedures in response to the emergence of the Omicron variant.

Over the course of this school year, many districts have moved to introduce ‘test-to-stay’ measures that allow students potentially exposed to the virus to skip quarantine, provided they test negative for COVID on a rapid test. The WHO confirmed Sunday that existing PCR tests do accurately detect infection from the Omicron variant, but studies are ongoing to determine the effectiveness at recognizing the new strain employed in most test-to-stay schemes.

Since September, there have been over , and in the week before Thanksgiving, children accounted for about a quarter of new infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Weekly youth cases are on the rise, up 32 percent as of Nov. 18 over the previous week to 142,000, but they are well below their peak in early September of 252,000.

Over 19 million youth have received at least one vaccine dose, President Biden said in his Monday address. Over 99 percent of schools nationwide are now open for in-person learning, he pointed out, compared to less than half this time last year.

The new strain further underscores the importance of continuing efforts to boost vaccination rates within school communities, said Domenech, and raises the stakes for immunizing newly eligible children.

“The bottom line here is that unless we get to the point where the majority of people are vaccinated, where we can get to that herd immunity point, these variants are going to keep coming [and] kids are going to get infected,” he said.

Correction: Last week, 621 schools across 58 districts announced new closures for a variety of reasons. An earlier version of the story incorrectly reported that 9,313 campuses across 916 districts had announced closures last week. Those numbers represent the total closures since the start of the academic year.

In December and January, his 8,900-student district just north of Atlanta partnered with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study classroom virus transmission, ultimately adjusting their distancing protocols to reduce spread. In September, after reading an written by a Harvard University professor that proposed using rapid antigen tests to give healthy kids an alternative to quarantine, he reached out directly to the author asking about the model — and ultimately implemented the “” scheme in his schools. Now, the district is planning to hold for students this month as COVID shots roll out for younger kids.

But despite a keen eye for the latest coronavirus safety research, Rivera made another move in mid-October that many parents had clamored for, but health experts cautioned against: He lifted Marietta’s mask requirement.

“​​We tried to get to a solution that we think is good for our community,” the superintendent told ����Ӱ��. “Could I give kids a bit more sense of normalcy back that they haven’t had for two years? I think that’s a question we’re grappling with.” 

The move typifies a trend emerging nationwide, as school leaders respond to .

At least a dozen districts that previously required face coverings are now mask-optional, including ; and . Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 135 now have mask mandates — down from 150 on Oct. 1 and lower than at any point this school year since mid-August, according to , a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

That pattern worries Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

Over the summer, the health expert used simulation modeling technology to predict how many positive COVID cases would be transmitted in schools, depending on their vaccination rates and mitigation measures. The that he and his team published in August recommended that schools drop universal face-covering rules only once 80 percent of students and staff are fully immunized and community transmission is below 10 cases per 100,000 people. 

Currently, the U.S. averages . And while as many as , of eligible youth have received both shots.

Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 are expected to roll out in days and as many as with children in the age group plan to have their kids immunized, according to surveys, but a significant share before doing so, they say. About a quarter said they definitely would not vaccinate their children.

With vaccination rates as they currently stand, school buildings are largely full of people unprotected against the virus, Linas pointed out.

“That is a setup for trouble in the future, having ongoing smoldering transmission because people are under vaccinated and we’re not wearing masks,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The virus continues, new variants emerge — those threats are real.”

Other experts, including Joseph Allen, the Harvard public health professor that Rivera corresponded with about Marietta’s test-and-stay approach, argue that schools should take a more dynamic approach to masking requirements, dropping them when transmission falls. Given the current situation, he advocates for the end of all school face-covering requirements by January, if not sooner.

“If things change for the worse — and they might — then we just pull the masks back out of the drawer. But we must be just as willing to put them away when things look better,” Allen wrote in an October .

At the state level, Massachusetts has set a benchmark that aligns with the Linas’s recommendation, for any school that reaches 80 percent student and staff vaccination. But new guidance in allows schools to scrap face coverings where community transmission is low and gives districts the option to do the same if they maintain stringent quarantine rules. Neither policy accounts for immunization levels in the school community.

Georgia, similarly, is a state that gives local school leaders the power to set their own coronavirus safety policies. In Marietta, the district’s program for testing students and staff who may have been exposed to the virus played into the calculus for Rivera’s decision to go mask-optional.

“There’s an interplay between these approaches,” the superintendent said. “Your approach to masks will impact the distance at which you are identifying close contacts — three feet vs. six feet, indoors. The number of students who are identified as close contacts, that drives your test-and-stay demand.” 

Because 98 percent of would-be quarantines in his district never ultimately tested positive, Rivera hoped the testing policy, which the district has funded partially through relief dollars, would keep students learning in the classroom, regardless of whether they were wearing masks. 

Out of 281 tests so far administered by the program, 271 have come back negative, the superintendent said — meaning those students have been able to stay in the school building.

The “test-to-stay” strategy has been this fall and is lauded by public health experts. The CDC said in mid-October that they are considering into their school coronavirus guidance.

Regarding masking, the CDC recommends universal use, but in practice, the policies have been much more controversial, with eruptions over the mandates in dozens of districts. 

“I felt like I’ve had to navigate this path by myself,” said Rivera. “I feel like most people sit on either side of it. Either it’s, ‘Nope, we have to follow blindly what the CDC says,’ or we pretend that COVID doesn’t exist. And I don’t think either one of those is right, there’s a balance in the middle.”

The softened masking rules have had some real benefits, according to teachers in the district. Foreign language classes, for instance, were strained when everyone had to cover up.

“It is really tough when kids are learning a new language for the first time to pronounce new sounds, not seeing how to form their mouth, or [seeing] my mouth because I’m covered up in a mask,” Wendy Locke, a French teacher at Marietta High School, told ����Ӱ��.

Barbie Esquijarosa, who teaches English to non-native speakers at the high school, agrees that face coverings make school more difficult for young people learning English. But she also worries that the mask-optional policy presents an added stressor for the students she teaches, many of whom may live with older relatives and lack health insurance.

“They come in concerned,” said Esquijarosa. “They’re wearing [the mask] the whole time. They’ll stay away from the kids who don’t wear the masks.”

What’s more, many of her students lack transportation, meaning they aren’t able to participate in Marietta’s test-and-stay program if they have possible COVID exposures.

Rivera recognizes that the program is accessible only to students with transportation and is working to designate a bus to pick up kids for COVID testing. But as of yet, no such route is in operation. Like many other districts across the country, Marietta’s bus driver reserves are amid wider facing schools and the U.S. economy.

Elsewhere, some school districts have taken an opposite stance on masking. When the department of health in Douglas County, Colorado moved to remove face-covering mandates, the school district sued on behalf of nine medically vulnerable students — winning a on the new rule.

“No parent should be forced to choose between sending their child to school and risking their child’s health, and no family should have to fear that their child may face life-threatening illness just to access their right to a great education,” Superintendent Corey Wise said in a statement.

Back in Marietta, there has been no increase in coronavirus infections since Rivera dropped universal masking rules. Total infections have fallen from 233 in the first five weeks of schools to 143 in the seven weeks that followed, according to the district.

Still, Linas, the Boston University medical expert, cautions against the mask-optional policy. 

Breathing room now for students and staff may mean breathing room for the virus — to mutate and evolve — in the long run, he said.

“It just doesn’t make sense to start rolling those dice when we’re so close to the actual finish line.”

With the vast majority of U.S. students once again learning in classrooms, 180 of the largest 500 U.S. school districts have enacted requirements for their staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19, according to an analysis published Monday by Burbio, an organization that has tracked school safety policies through the pandemic.

It’s a safety measure that health experts say represents a key step toward improved coronavirus safety in school — especially as younger students remain ineligible for shots likely until November. Although children rarely fall seriously ill from the virus, young people still make up of new cases in the U.S. and school-based outbreaks have triggered some already in 2021-22.

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“Most pediatricians that I’ve spoken with … absolutely support vaccine mandates for teachers,” Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, told ����Ӱ��. “It’s the right thing to do.”

In 11 states, coronavirus vaccines are mandated for teachers statewide, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education reports, meaning a considerable share of the 180 districts with staff mandates enacted such policies because state law required it.

Still, vaccination rules , with some mandates having already kicked in and others not taking effect until next month.

Some school systems have more lenient policies, such as Philadelphia, which acknowledged that unvaccinated teachers , though they will be subject to twice-weekly testing. Others impose stricter sanctions, like New York City, which is barring unvaccinated teachers from entering school buildings and putting them on unpaid leave until they get the shot.

Even those districts where staff have a choice between vaccination or regular testing are included in the 36 percent tally, Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche confirmed to ����Ӱ��.

The New York City mandate, which took effect Oct. 4 after a brief legal challenge, applies to roughly 150,000 people who work in the nation’s largest school system, and of employees to receive their shots in the weeks before the rule took effect. Some 96 percent of teachers in the district have now been immunized against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.

By contrast, Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school system, on Monday extended its deadline for employees to receive their shots from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, fearing that strict enforcement would . Unlike the New York City mandate, the L.A. rule requires two doses before the deadline for educators receiving the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

While many teacher mandates are in deep blue states, the San Antonio Independent School District has an immunization requirement set to go into effect Oct. 15. Earlier this month, the district’s rule from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when a county judge denied the state’s motion to secure a temporary injunction on the mandate. A ruling on the policy from a higher court is .

Meanwhile, on Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning all COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state, .

“We are reviewing the new executive order and consulting with our legal counsel and Board of Trustees to determine how the district will proceed with its employee vaccine mandate,” a San Antonio ISD spokesperson wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

In lieu of mandates, other Texas districts are providing cash incentives for teachers who roll up their sleeves. , and each deliver $500 bonuses to fully vaccinated educators.

Vaccine mandates for students remain much more rare, with only a select few districts having implemented such rules. California districts Los Angeles, Oakland and Culver City as well as Hoboken, New Jersey have each made immunization a requirement for in-person school for vaccine-eligible students, with deadlines in the coming months. Washington, D.C. is .

In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

Burbio’s count that 36 percent of top districts require teachers to be immunized comes as the rush to embrace such policies has slowed considerably. After eight states moved to enact educator mandates in late August and early September, only one — Delaware — has added a similar rule since then, CRPE reports.

But even as COVID case counts , Deeter, the pediatrics professor, warns that now is not time for the country to let down its guard.

“As the surge goes down … now everybody’s like ‘Yay! [The pandemic] is over.’ It’s not over. It’s not even close to over. We are just prepping for the next wave,” she said. “We have to prepare.”

After just eight days in classrooms, 37 positive coronavirus cases in the 16,000-student district outside Indianapolis had triggered hundreds of student quarantines, forcing young people to miss out on classes and extracurriculars.

Superintendent Jeff Butts knew he had to act fast. The district had begun the year mask optional in late July. But in early August, he stumbled on a solution, hidden in plain sight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just updated its guidance, exempting students from self-isolation if they and the infected student were properly masked and spaced at least 3 feet apart.

“That was my biggest tipping point, quite frankly, when the CDC came out and made that change,” Butts told ����Ӱ��. “I realized that if we had all of our children in masks … I can quarantine fewer children.”

But not everyone got the message. It doesn’t appear that the guidance trickled down to many other school systems, where , according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education. One reason for the disconnect is that CDC made little attempt to billboard the policy shift, which only appears in an on case investigation and tracing updated Aug. 5.

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“It’s buried in some appendix to the close contact definition,” Emily Oster, Brown University economist who has tracked schooling through the pandemic, told ����Ӱ��. Under many school systems’ quarantine protocols, spending 15 minutes within a six foot radius of an infected individual — sitting next to them in class, for example — can force students to stay home for up to two weeks. The new exemption allows schools to bypass that rule in cases where both individuals mask up.

Across the country, as school leaders struggle with quarantine totals that are stretching into the thousands just weeks after schools opened their doors, the new masking exemption to self-isolation guidelines, could help districts sidestep chaotic reopenings amid divisive politics surrounding the use of masks.

In the past week across the country, New Orleans School District after 299 recorded COVID cases. Mississippi has statewide, an official announced. And a district in Texas . Meanwhile, Texas — among other states like Florida, Arkansas and Arizona — maintains a ban on mask mandates, though school systems like those in Dallas and Miami are .

The CDC did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s request for an explanation of why the update wasn’t publicized more widely. But Oster, the Brown economist, said it’s possible that when the CDC updated the definition of close contact for quarantining, “they didn’t realize how important it would be for school guidance,” and thus didn’t heavily broadcast the change.

At the very least, it’s clear the hidden clause gives districts a “huge incentive to have everybody mask,” Oster said.

As of Aug. 11, all students and faculty in Wayne Township are now required to wear face coverings. Site leaders have told Butts that the district is already seeing fewer quarantines, though the superintendent said he doesn’t yet have this week’s numbers.

Wayne Township is not the only locale to pull the trigger on face coverings in response to skyrocketing COVID absences. Elsewhere in Indiana, Greater Clark County Schools adopted a universal masking rule on Aug. 7 after some 70 COVID cases . In Arkansas, the Marion schools superintendent mourned that the state-level ban on mask mandates had caused a nearly in his district. And in Ohio, in an effort to avoid the fate of mass quarantines, Lakota Local Schools outside Cincinnati announced a , just two days before students returned to classrooms.

“Because we want to keep our kids in school all year long, just like we did last year, we made a decision this weekend to move to masks,” Superintendent Matt Miller told ����Ӱ��.

Where school systems have the latitude to set their own face covering rules, “all these school districts are probably going to go to masks because there’s too much COVID right now,” said Dennis Roche, co-founder of the website Burbio, which has tracked school policy through the pandemic.

While exposure to infected individuals often keeps large numbers of students home from school, very few students in isolation actually turn out to contract the virus themselves, Oster noted. Having a rule that allows healthy students to avoid missing class is crucial, she said.

“The quarantine itself is tremendously disruptive. And so I think that having an off ramp or a way to make it possible for people not to have to quarantine after an exposure is just huge for generating a functioning school system.”

As Delta variant COVID cases continue to surge, allowing students to come to school without masks and spread the virus is inexcusable, said Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association.

“If you have to now quarantine a student because they’ve been exposed to somebody because nobody was wearing a mask, that’s a problem,” he told ����Ӱ��. “From a logistical point of view, the easiest thing to do is to say everybody needs to wear a mask.”

Despite the potentially large implications for schools’ daily operations, there was “not much emphasis” on the CDC’s policy change, said Domenech — meaning many districts may still be struggling to catch up.

From a public health perspective, the move aligns with what Phil Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says are the best practices to prevent the spread of COVID.

“Where we are with our case transmission rates across the country… I think [masking] makes all the sense in the world,” he told ����Ӱ��. It’s “the bare minimum we should be doing at this time.”

Still, in his home state, face covering policies in school are “all over the map,” he said, which he fears could spell unnecessary COVID spread and lost learning.

Last week in Georgia, for example, four school districts — some of which had mask-optional policies — due to COVID outbreaks.

As summer ends and students return Wednesday to Lakota Local Schools, that’s precisely the situation that Superintendent Miller hopes to avoid.

“I think the social emotional pitfall of masking is bad enough, but I think the social emotional pitfall of being at home and learning again from home is probably worse.”