State and National Leaders Call for Teacher Vaccine Mandates

• California became the or agree to weekly testing.
• for teachers and other school staff.
• says teachers should be required to be vaccinated.
• that the union’s leadership should consider implementing a vaccine mandate for teachers in schools.
• The National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, will support policies that require teachers to either get vaccinated or submit to regular testing, .

August 13, 2021 — The Big Three

Pediatricians tell the FDA to speed up approvals: A urges the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the approval process for COVID-19 vaccines for children.

• “In our view, the rise of the Delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children.”
• “The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children ages 5-11 years based on data from the initial enrolled cohort, which are already available, while continuing to follow safety data from the expanded cohort in the post-market setting. This approach would not slow down the time to authorization of these critically needed vaccines in the 5–11-year age group.”
• “Based on scientific data currently available on COVID-19 vaccines, as well as on 70 years of vaccinology knowledge in the pediatric population, the academy believes that clinical trials in these children can be safely conducted with a two-month safety follow-up for participants.”
• “Assuming that the two-month safety data does not raise any new safety concerns and that immunogenicity data are supportive of use, we believe that this is sufficient for authorization in this and any other age group. Waiting on a six-month follow-up will significantly hinder the ability to reduce the spread of the hyperinfectious COVID-19 Delta variant among this age group, since it would add four additional months before an authorization decision can be considered.”

What Parents Think About Vaccines: report from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals some important data about vaccination.

• “Hispanic and Black parents are more likely than white parents to cite concerns that reflect access barriers to vaccination, including not being able to get the vaccine from a trusted place, believing they may have to pay an out-of-pocket cost or difficulty traveling to a vaccination site.”
• Parents support school mask mandates more than required vaccines.
• Only 4 in 10 parents of children ages 12-17 say their teen’s school provided information about COVID-19 vaccines for children or encouraged parents to get their children vaccinated.
• “Twice as many parents whose school encouraged vaccination report that their child is vaccinated compared to those whose schools did not (62 percent versus 30 percent).”

50 State Reopening Plans: The Center on Reinventing Public Education

• Its new includes the most pressing indicators that state and local leaders are facing in reopening schools this fall: state policies on masking, vaccines, full in-person instruction, virtual learning options and continuity of learning plans.

Federal Updates

White House:

• Politico reports that
• The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration is looking into whether it can . More from
• Fact Sheet: .
• Related: from a press briefing with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

City & State News

Arizona: A teacher is despite the governor’s ban.

Arkansas:

• “ that prevents schools and other governmental agencies from requiring masks,” the AP reports.
• as school year approaches.
• .
• New data on kids and COVID-19 led Gov. Asa Hutchinson to .

Florida:

• and move their kids to another school if they perceive any type of “COVID-19 harassment” against their child in connection to district rules on masking, testing and isolation due to exposure, under an emergency rule approved Friday.
• — op-ed by Carlee Simon, superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools

Illinois: .” Among the issues still being negotiated:

• Ventilation upgrades
• A COVID-19 testing plan for vaccinated and unvaccinated members of school communities
• Maintenance of criteria and health metrics based on COVID prevalence to pause in-person instruction
• Full-time contact tracers, nurses, social workers and counselors in every school building
• A comprehensive home visit program to engage students and families in every school

Kentucky:

New Jersey: Just 9 percent of Newark students met state math standards this spring, . Only 11 percent of students met expectations in reading.

COVID-19 Research

Children and COVID-19:

• 4.2 million total child COVID-19 cases reported, and children represented 14.3 percent of all cases.
• Among states reporting, children were 0.00-0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and seven states reported zero child deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Need to Stop Confusing the Public: .

• “The CDC is still mired in the fog of pandemic, with too little data, collected too slowly, leaving it chasing epidemic waves and trying to make sense of information from other countries. Epidemics spread exponentially, so delayed responses make problems much worse.”
• “The Provincetown study was certainly useful. It provided one more example of how well the vaccines worked in preventing severe disease or worse, but also of the need to take Delta seriously: to expand vaccine mandates, speed up formal approval of vaccines, work hard at increasing vaccinations and urge the use of masks for everyone, especially in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces in areas where infections are high and vaccinations are low.”
• “The Epidemic Intelligence Service unit of the CDC has a core principle that needs to remain at the forefront of everything the administration does: A pandemic is a communications emergency as much as it is a medical crisis. Effective communication is much more than choosing the right words. It needs a wholesale approach starting with clarity of purpose, a realistic assessment of where things are, including factors outside the agency’s control, collection and presentation of detailed data when possible and an open acknowledgment of uncertainty and underlying reasoning when precautionary steps are being advised.”

The mRNA Vaccines Are Extraordinary, but Novavax Is Even Better: Persistent hype around mRNA vaccine technology is distracting us from other ways to end the pandemic, .

• “The Novavax vaccine also has a substantially lower rate of side effects than the authorized mRNA vaccines. Last week’s data showed that about 40 percent of people who receive Novavax report fatigue after the second dose, as compared with 65 percent for Moderna and more than 55 percent for Pfizer.”
• “Lower rates of adverse events are likely to be a bigger issue still for parents, when considering vaccination for their children.”

CDC Strengthens Its Recommendation for Pregnant Woman to Get Vaccinated: found no increased risk of miscarriage after COVID-19 vaccination during early pregnancy.

• “COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people 12 years and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now or might become pregnant in the future,” .

We Studied 1 Million Students. This Is What We Learned About Masking: . has prompted a bit of debate

• “Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection.”
• “In conjunction with North Carolina, the ABC Science Collaborative collected data from more than 1 million students and staff members in the state’s schools from March to June 2021.”
• “We believe this low rate of transmission occurred because of the mask-on-mask school environment: Both the infected person and the close contact wore masks.”
• But: criticized the essay and study for failing to have a control group, casting doubts on the claims.

Made to Save: is a national education and grassroots campaign working to save lives by increasing access to the COVID-19 vaccines. It has to help schools with vaccinations, including support for events:

6 Ways Schools Can Promote COVID-19 Vaccination:

Viewpoints

Opening Schools Should Be Priority No. 1: .

• “Getting kids back in the classroom must be a societywide priority. We must turn the page on the last school year, when too many unions obstructed or slowed down school reopenings. America’s children cannot afford a repeat of that harmful episode, and it’s essential that teachers help lead the way.”
• “In other words: The time for excuses is over. After saying two weeks ago that the union would ‘try to open up schools,’ [American Federation of Teachers President Randi] Weingarten seemed to realize she misspoke — because trying isn’t good enough. Last week, she said she was ‘1,000 percent committed to getting teachers and kids back in school.’ That’s good, and now we need union leaders to follow through on it.”

How to Sell SEL: Parents and the Politics of Social-Emotional Learning: from the Fordham Institute:

• Parents overwhelmingly support teaching SEL-related skills in schools, but the term “social and emotional learning” is relatively unpopular.
• Differences of opinion often break along partisan lines, but interestingly, differences by parents’ race, class and religion are rarely as pronounced as differences by political affiliation.

The Kindergarten Exodus: , The New York Times reports.

How Should I Think About School & Child Care With Delta? .

…And on a Lighter Note

I Wish: That a side effect of the vaccine was the ability to

Timeline cleanser.

Happy Saturday…

— Rex Chapman?? (@RexChapman)

ICYMI @The74

Weekend Reads: In case you missed them, our top five stories of the week:

• Pandemic Recovery: Trailblazing Leader Was Hired to Fix Colorado Springs Schools. Will Doubling Down on His Reforms Avert COVID Classroom Crisis? (Read more)
• Mask Debate: Biden Administration Defends Districts Defying Florida Mask Mandate Ban as Delta Variant Renews Reopening Fears (Read more)
• Space Camp: At Space Center Houston, ‘Awe and Wonder’ are Keeping Kids Connected to STEM Education After Pandemic Stifled Hands-On Learning (Read more)
• History Education: Genocide ‘In My Own Backyard’ — North Carolina Educators Ignored State’s Eugenics History Long Before Critical Race Theory Pushback (Read more)
• Summer Learning: In a Summer of Recovery for Students, Long-Running Programs Thrive While Some Face Teacher Shortages (Read more)

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

Ready for Better: Why Parents Want Bold Change in K-12 Education: , 67 percent said they are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” that the COVID-19 crisis has negatively affected their child’s academic growth.

• 3 in 4 say they want up-to-date information on student learning.
• “Overwhelming majorities of parents want states to be transparent about how the education stimulus money is being used, and provide updates on the new funding’s impact on student performance.”
• ; .

May 14, 2021 — The Big Three

FCC to help families with broadband, device costs: The Federal Communications Commission officially opened the for enrollment. More than 800 broadband providers are participating. The program offers:

• Up to a $50-a-month discount on service and associated equipment
• Up to a $75-a-month discount on for households on tribal lands
• A one-time discount of up to $100 on a tablet, laptop or desktop computer
• How we got here: How Internet Inequity Persisted Through 4 Presidents and Left Schools Unprepared for the Pandemic

California: Most Los Angeles high schoolers are staying home

• Only , far less than expected. About 30 percent of elementary school children have returned, and 12 percent of middle school students.
• “Many in communities hard-hit during the winter surge are not sufficiently reassured that schools are safe. they were put off by safety practices they consider unnecessarily extreme, especially in middle and high schools. And some parents and students said they were hesitant or unable to disrupt ongoing routines so late in the school year, which ends June 11.” .

New research: Children are not COVID-19 ‘superspreaders,’ .

• “In our setting, children do not seem to be the source of SARS CoV-2 infection and most frequently acquire the virus from adults. Our findings suggest that in settings such as ours, schools and child care potentially may be reopened safely if adequate COVID-19 mitigation measures are in place and staff are appropriately immunized.”
• “Our findings demonstrate that most frequently, children acquire infection from adults, rather than transmitting it to them.” ()

Federal Updates

Vaccine Approved for 12-15-Year-Olds: On Monday, the the Pfizer vaccine for 12-15-year-olds. On Wednesday, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ . (Yes: 14; No: 0; Recused: 1 because of conflict of interest).

• Vaccine hesitancy: “A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that less than a third of parents say they are willing to get their child vaccinated immediately,” ����Ӱ�� reported this week.
• “Over the coming days and weeks, there will be TV ads, social media campaigns and events with ‘celebrities and influencers who have the ability to reach out to teens and their parents.’ The White House declined to preview who these celebrities might be,” .
• Related: School Districts Get Creative Promoting Vaccine to Teens

Homework Gap: The FCC funding through the E-rate program.

• The vote likely means the program will open in early July.
• The final version made an important change from the draft proposal. First, districts will be able to apply for purchases made for the upcoming school year during the first application window. After this initial application window, a second window will be opened, and funds that remain can be used to reimburse districts for expenses incurred since the beginning of the school closures (March 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021).

USDA Distance Learning & Telemedicine Grant Program (DLT): Is to organizations supporting distance learning and telemedicine in rural communities. The deadline for this competitive grant program is June 4.

U.S. Treasury: $350 billion in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. . These funds can be used to support a wide variety of community and education projects, among other uses.

COVID-19 Research

COVID Cases in San Francisco: who have returned to elementary schools since the district reopened for in-person learning three weeks ago.

• “In other words, zero cases were related to in-school transmission at SFUSD,” the city Department of Public Health said in a statement. “There were no cases among vaccinated teachers and staff” in the school district.

School Reopenings, Mobility and COVID-19 Spread: finds “reopening Texas schools gradually but substantially accelerated the community spread of COVID-19.”

• “In Texas, reopenings often occurred alongside high community spread and at near capacity, making it difficult to meet social distancing recommendations.”
• “Results imply that school reopenings led to at least 43,000 additional COVID-19 cases and 800 additional fatalities within the first two months.”
• However: “We then use SafeGraph mobility data to provide evidence that spillovers to adults’ behaviors contributed to these large effects. Median time spent outside the home on a typical weekday increased substantially in neighborhoods with large numbers of school-age children, suggesting a return to in-person work or increased outside-of-home leisure activities among parents.”

Transmission Occurs at Home, Not Schools: New finds most transmission occurred within households, not at places of work (or schools):

• “The evidence suggests that ‘households show the highest transmission rates’ and ‘are high-risk settings for the transmission’ of [COVID-19]. Schools, businesses and other organizations implemented a range of prevention protocols — from adjusting airflow to installing physical barriers to monitoring compliance to administering their own testing services — that households did not, and perhaps could not.”
• “On an hourly basis, the schools studied were more than four times as safe as the places frequented by students and staff when not in school.”

School Closures in Germany: A new study finds .

• “In line with our results on school closures, we find concerns about the return to full-schooling capacity after the summer holidays to be unsubstantiated. Infections among children and adults did not rise with the start of the new academic year.”
• “Instead, infections appear to have increased in the last weeks of the summer holidays and declined in the days after reopening.”

City & State News

Virginia: The state announced . Funds can be used for:

• Increased in-person instruction and small-group learning
• Targeted remediation, extended instruction and enrichment
• Strategic virtual learning, technology and staff training
• Social-emotional, behavioral and mental health supports for students and staff;
• Alternate learning opportunities
• Student-progress monitoring and assessment

Washington: State health leaders said K-12 schools should prepare for .��

Maryland: A is helping Baltimore City school system track and contain infections.

North Carolina: House Bill 934 would create the . Eligible families would receive $1,000 per student, up to $3,000 per household. They can spend the funds on things like summer learning or afterschool programs.

Texas: New to offer mix of in-person and virtual learning

Viewpoints

Impact of COVID-19 on Parents’ Education Spending: from Tyton Partners and Walton Family Foundation.

• Parents and caregivers took greater responsibility for school decision-making during the pandemic. More than 15 percent switched their child’s school for the 2020-21 academic year, which is estimated to be 2.5 times more than pre-pandemic.
• School enrollment shifted, with public and private schools experiencing an estimated decrease of 2.6 million students; charter schools, homeschooling, learning pods and microschools all saw net increases.
• Households spent an estimated $20 billion more on an annualized basis on education-related activities, primarily stemming from the emergence of supplemental learning pods.
• Limited awareness of, and access to, alternative and emerging learning models significantly hindered parent agency, particularly for those at lower-income levels. ()

Summer Learning and Beyond: Opportunities for Equitable Learning Postpandemic: A new offers six principles for creating “intellectually rigorous and equitable learning settings”:

• Center relationships
• Create a culture of affirmation and belonging
• Build from students’ interests and take a whole-child approach to their development
• Engage students’ and families’ knowledge in disciplinary learning
• Provide creative, inquiry-based forms of learning
• Address educator needs and learning ()

A Misleading CDC Number:

• “When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that ‘less than 10 percent’ of COVID-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.”
• “In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.”
• “Saying that less than 10 percent of COVID transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.”
• “[CDC officials] continue to treat outdoor transmission as a major risk. The CDC says that … summer camps should require children to wear masks virtually ‘at all times.’”

WorkRise: Will that advances knowledge of strengthening economic well-being and accelerating economic mobility for workers earning low wages, particularly employees of color and others who have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 economic crisis.

Catholic Schools Are Losing Students at Record Rates, and Hundreds Are Closing: exacerbate schools’ challenge. “At least 209 of the country’s nearly 6,000 Catholic schools have closed over the past year, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.” .

Don’t Ban Virtual School. Improve It: Via

Hop, Skip, Leapfrog: A new explores ways schools and systems pursued student-centered innovation during COVID-19. Great list of examples and resources based on “hops” (small changes), “skips” (medium-size changes) and “leaps” (big, structural changes). ()

… And on a Lighter Note

Last weekend, we celebrated mothers: reviews some of the day’s failures.

Hate doing these but it’s part of the deal..

ICYMI @The74

Weekend Reads: In case you missed them, our top five stories of the week:

• Reopening: Returning this Fall, By Popular Demand: Virtual School. For Communities of Color, it’s Largely a Matter of Trust (Read more)
• Vaccines: As FDA Approves Shots for Youth 12 and Up, School Districts Get Creative Promoting Vaccine to Teens (Read more)
• Learning Loss: Learning to Cut Hair — at Home: How Remote Classes Forced Career Technical Students to Lose Hands-On Skills Classes During the Pandemic (Read more)
• Student Voice: How Neil deGrasse Tyson Showed Me the Wonders of the Universe, Inspired My Career and Got Me Through the Pandemic (Read more)
• Summer School: Designing Fun-Filled Summer Learning Programs That Students Will Want to Attend (Read more)

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .