Why the new shot at reopening Anchorage schools might work

By this point, Superintendent Deena Bishop likely feels like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. Three times, the Anchorage School District has laid out plans for returning students to classrooms for in-person instruction. And three times, a combination of circumstances — high community transmission of COVID-19, overstressed hospitals, and misgivings by administrators and teachers — has caused those plans to be delayed or dismantled.

We should all hope that the fourth time is the charm.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Superintendent Bishop moved swiftly to cancel school-sponsored travel and extend spring break by a week. Gov. Mike Dunleavy extended that closure statewide through the end of March — and ultimately the end of the school year. Based on the limited information we had at the time, those moves were the right ones, though Bishop was criticized by many parents at the time for disrupting the end of the school year for students. Canceling school-sponsored travel and opting to not bring students back after many of them had traveled with their families on spring break was likely instrumental in Alaska’s early success in holding COVID-19 transmission to a trickle, even as it ravaged densely populated states such as New York and New Jersey.

Approaching the midway point of the 2020-2021 school year, Bishop thinks it’s time to plan for students’ return to schools, despite case numbers that are higher than in the spring. And once again, her reasoning is sound. A growing body of evidence is challenging the notion that reopening schools would lead to runaway case growth — even in communities such as Anchorage, where community spread is far from controlled. In places where schools have reopened, there has been spread among students — but not wild spread. Children don’t spread the virus as easily as adults, and with proper precautions, the likelihood of spread in schools can be reduced further. Data from East Coast states shows that there, students enrolled in online-only learning contract COVID-19 at roughly the same rate as those attending in-person classes, indicating that the nexus of the disease’s spread occurs outside — and largely independent of — schools.

After the false starts at returning to in-person instruction this fall, Superintendent Bishop is wisely being cautious about plans for the spring semester. Her plan for the district would have students going back mid-January — just younger ones, at first, and focusing on those who have been struggling with online learning. This is smart for two reasons: It focuses on the most at-risk students, and it targets an age range among whom spread has been less prevalent so far. And by waiting until two weeks after the holiday break ends, we should have a much better idea whether some students have been exposed to COVID-19 and should stay away from in-person school.

The situation in mid-January, needless to say, will be much different from where things stand today. Presuming that emergency authorization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines is granted next week, as is widely expected, administration of the vaccines to at-risk populations such as health care workers and residents of live-in care facilities will begin at once. And although supplies of the vaccine will be limited (especially early on), by mid-January, a substantial number of Alaska’s most at-risk residents will have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and some will have completed the full two-dose regimen. Those numbers will improve continually as the school year progresses, taking more and more Alaskans out of the at-risk population for COVID-19.

That said, most of us who are more or less healthy won’t receive the vaccine for months, toward the end of the school year or early in summer. That means it’s essential that we do our part to make sure spread like what’s happening now is curbed by mid-January, in order to keep the ball rolling on in-person schooling and give it the best chance of success. If we abide by health measures (wearing masks, distancing from those outside our households and practicing good hygiene and hand-washing) and refrain from attending gatherings outside our immediate families, we can return COVID-19 infection numbers to more reasonable levels in a month’s time. Our No. 1 priority this holiday season should be ensuring a safe climate in which our children can begin returning to in-person classes. If we can manage that, a host of other positives — mental health benefits, economic recovery, a dramatic reduction in the number of Alaskans we’re losing to the pandemic — will inevitably follow.