Some districts and parents are pushing to return to personal school after nearly a year of coronavirus

Whether you want to stay online or return to class has been a divisive problem in many districts. While some are concerned that it is not safe to send teachers and students back to campus before the virus is under control, others say the impact on the quality of education and stress on families is more urgent.

The US is still months away from vaccinating the majority of Americans against the virus, but the doses are making their way to the public, and pressure to reopen public schools has been rekindled in some districts.

“In most, if not all, states, teachers should now be eligible for vaccination,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Today against NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. Even if they can’t get themselves vaccinated yet, Walensky said “they should get in line early, and so they should get it soon.”

Walensky said she is hopeful that schools with vaccinations and mitigation measures can reopen soon, but others are calling for a faster return.

Hard line calls for options to be reopened

A father in Virginia called a county school board “a bunch of cowards” for not offering options for sending students back to school.

“There are people like me and a whole host of other people who like to sit down and find out!” Brandon Michon told the sign.

“This is about finding ways to get our kids back to school and giving families the opportunity to help them get back to school to learn, be mentally healthy and be kids,” he said in an interview with CNN. .

Iowa Governor Kim Reynold signed a bill on Friday requiring school districts to provide families with options for full-time, one-to-one education.

Reynolds said in the fall that a “vast majority” of schools offered full-time face-to-face learning. “Unfortunately, that option is not available to every family,” she said. “Many struggle to find a balance between working from home and helping their young children navigate online learning.”

Study supports school safety

Some experts say science indicates that schools are a safe place to send students if the right measures are taken.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Obama, said that as long as masks are used in schools, there is good ventilation in buildings, social distances and the elimination of teacher break areas and extracurricular activities, he “would not wait for teacher vaccination. . “

“Classrooms need to stay open for as long as possible and reopen as soon as possible, personal learning is hugely important,” Frieden said during an Axios podcast interview on Friday.

A study of two American schools released Friday supports the argument that schools are not a major dissemination site if proper precautions are taken.

The study examined 3,500 students in different schools that the researchers said took necessary precautions. Since only 9% of the students who brought new infections into school infected others, they wrote that there was “no evidence of student-to-teacher or teacher-to-student transmission in either school.”

The majority of cases were related to non-compliance with mask rules and off-campus resources, including siblings returning from college, off-campus activities, parties and gatherings, they wrote.

“Children contract and can transmit Covid-19, but the disease rate when in school is lower than the disease rate when not attending school, suggesting that children and communities are at lower risk when children attend school,” Dr. Darria Long of the University of Tennessee’s emergency medicine department, who worked on the study, said.

“This may be because mitigating measures in the controlled school environment (which are not possible when children are not in school) can significantly suppress transmission.”