Today, Explained - School's out for Covid

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

The country’s largest school district told a million kids to stay home during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s creating chaos for teachers, students, and parents. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can you tell me your name and what grade you're in? I'm Ben, Ben Kafka, and I am in 6th grade at MS 839. My name is Jonah. I go to school in PS 261. I am in 4th grade, and I live in Brooklyn, New York. And how are you and Ben related? Ben is my brother. So, Ben, what's going on with school? Well, they closed it yesterday because of the virus, and they don't want large groups of people.

But last time I was there, there weren't many people anyway. How are you feeling, Jonah? It doesn't feel like a weekend because I know that I should be in school right now. So it sort of feels like a break, like winter break. And I think that when I come back to school, I'm going to be thinking like, wait, I'm not in a new grade? I'm still in fourth grade? What happened? Were you surprised all the schools shut down? Yeah, like not. I thought it was just a district.

And then it's like every school in New York. That's crazy. Ben, how do you feel about it? It kind of feels wrong. I kind of feel like right now I should be in school. Not sitting around at home sheltering. Is it boring to be at home? Kind of.

What are you planning to do for the next couple of weeks while you're at home? Well, my school's been posting schoolwork online, so I'm going to do a little of that. I'm going to play some video games and watch some movies and do some other stuff that doesn't involve digital devices. So Jonah, with this virus, are you scared at all? No, the virus doesn't scare me because I know that it's a very hard chance for me to get it and if i get it it's a 0.2 chance i'm gonna die um i feel actually pretty scared uh because uh i'm not sure where jonah's getting these estimates from but it's spreading quickly and I just have sometimes I feel like I think about worst case scenario a lot

so might be just that talking but I feel pretty scared I'm scared too Ben and you know I'm glad that you're there with your dad and with Jonah yeah we'll just start at the beginning if you can just tell me your name and uh the best way to introduce you sure my name is lauren gardner i teach eighth grade english at a public school

in carol gardens red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. And what's your school like? What are the students like there? We serve a fairly diverse population of kids. About 40% or more identify as Latinx. About a third identify as Black African American. About 20% identify as white. And the majority of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which makes us a Title I school as well. When did coronavirus start impacting your day-to-day life at school? that we may expect to see children staying home and that we needed to be prepared to send work home for those children or that it was time to start thinking

about how we might digitize our curriculum in the event that school closed. It seemed very impossible to tell what was going on and when we would hear and what we needed to do. And even being told, yes, digitize your curriculums felt a little abstract to me this week. Did your students stop showing up this week at all? This past Friday was the first day

that we had a significant drop in attendance. We had like 50% of our kids showed up. I saw teachers unsure whether to even proceed with teaching. It felt like a very strange day to be in the building. And you were starting to hear reports of, you know, restaurants need to operate at 50% capacity and schools still aren't closed. Certain principals were coming out and saying, like, I've got a confirmed case of a parent in our school of COVID-19. You need to know about this. You need to be able to

make a smart decision for your family. And that was prior to the schools being officially closed. And did that eventually start changing? There was a lot of drama over the weekend about why haven't schools closed? Neighboring school districts have closed. And did they forget about us or what? And there were calls to call in sick and do a protest and civil disobedience and a lot of energy going into getting the mayor to close schools and feeling angry and left behind. Okay, so where were you when you actually heard the news that New York was closing down the schools? I was actually on the phone with my co-teacher and she said, turn on Channel 8, turn on Channel 8.

I am very, very concerned that we see a rapid spread of this disease and it is time to take more dramatic measures. The mayor was giving a press conference with the chancellor and it was really intense. He sounded super upset. So I regret to have to announce that as of tomorrow, our public schools will be closed. We will make a first attempt to restart our schools on Monday, April 20th. But I have to be honest that we're dealing with a lot of unknowns and a lot of challenges. And we understand how difficult it will be to achieve that goal. My jaw hit the floor. I totally didn't expect that. And his phrasing was very ominous because

he said, the first time we will even attempt to reopen schools is April 20th. And it very well may be that schools don't open at all this year again. Other school districts around the country have closed. The Los Angeles School District has closed. I think that's the second biggest district in the country. What do you think took New York City so long to make this decision? I know that there's a significant concern about children who need schools for basic child care when I know that there's a significant concern about children who need schools for basic child care when I know that there's a concern about food and health services. Like maybe that was part of the delay in figuring out how are we going to provide services for kids when schools are closed beyond just curriculum. Do you know if there are plans to get meals to those students that don't have other ways to get food? Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that this week, all schools are open offering, quote,

grab-and-go meals for kids. Anyone who comes in will be able to get a quote, grab and go meal. I presume that some version of that plan is going to sustain through the duration of this crisis. But I don't know the specifics. I think that's definitely one of the giant question marks around this. How much guidance are you getting right now about how to stay in touch with your students when they're not in school? I think that is a gigantic question mark. Nothing has cohered for me in this way where I feel like I've got a very clear plan about how to move forward, but I don't know how that could be expected at this point. I have my students and my family's contact information. They're receiving regular updates from our principal and starting today or tomorrow, they're for sure going to be receiving regular updates from all of their teachers. It's just

going to take us a minute to kind of get our bearings and figure out how we're going to move forward. There's also a big, big question about kids who don't have reliable computer access. So on Thursday or Friday of this past week, my principal sent around surveys to the kids asking about their access to a computer, their access to internet. And it came back revealing that about 90 to 95% of our students have some kind of access to technology. But even that, I have a question mark around because what I feel anecdotally is that I see kids with a lot of inconsistent access to technology. Even if you are able to teach online or remotely or something, do you think you're going to be able to cover the expected amount of material, the normal amount that you're supposed to cover in eighth grade?

No, absolutely not. It really feels like a dialing down. We're not necessarily being explicitly told that, but this feels like a crisis. Up next, while schools are closed, students are going to miss out on a lot more than just class. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in for Sean Ramos-Furham, who's back tomorrow. This is Today Explained. Thank you. at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained,

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We've been talking about nationwide school closures on the show today. We started with New York, and on the other side of the country, Seattle was the first major school district

to announce extended closures due to the coronavirus last week. My name is Jesse Hagopian. I teach ethnic studies and English language arts at Garfield High School in Seattle. And Jesse first heard the news last Wednesday. So I was at my desk when an email alert popped up and I actually didn't look at the email right away. I was in the middle of some lesson planning, and then I heard hollering from the hallway, and I realized I might want to check that email. It was an announcement in the middle of the school day on Wednesday

that the schools would be closed for a minimum of two weeks starting the following day on Thursday. And I realized the hooping and hollering in the hallway was from students who were excited about the school closure. But I think just below that excitement was actually a lot of fear. We had some difficult conversations in my class that day. I told them that I was going to work on this and try to help make sure that all the schools were providing free food for kids who couldn't afford it and that we needed to help to get our union to be part of this effort and that I would help to really advocate for increased paid sick leave

to help their families and that if they needed anything, I was going to work to make sure that we had the technology to where we could communicate and I could provide ongoing instruction as well. And that's a real challenge. You know, I think it's highly ironic that in a city with as many tech giants as we have, that we don't have basic technological ability to continue the education of our students. And the digital divide is very real. What are the options for trying to communicate with the students during this period?

I mean, are they basically just going to be on break or are there sort of creative ways you're thinking of to continue their education while they're out? Well, the superintendent suggested that we should consider this like a spring break. The problem, however, is that the governor just came out on Thursday and announced that the initial two weeks of school closures would actually be extended to over six weeks at minimum, and even suggested that they might be closing schools again in the fall. When we're talking about that length of extended time away from school, it is really damaging to their education. So that's the actual education, but what about all the other stuff students get from schools, like meals? Well, thankfully, the school district has set up 26 sites around the city that will be providing food to my students. But 26 sites, to me, isn't nearly enough. And there will be students that have

difficulty finding the site that isn't their own school. You know, at Garfield High School, we have over 150 homeless students. And in the state of Washington, there's over 40,000 homeless students. And when the schools are closed like this, it's over 40,000 homeless students. And when the schools are closed like this, it's not just the meals that they miss, but our homeless students at Garfield rely on the school to do their laundry and to take showers. And those facilities have not been addressed. And so I think the city and the school district need to have much more robust conversations about the many services our schools provide from psychological well-being and counseling services to nursing services that are free, you know, to the showers and laundry and

meals. Yeah, I wonder, you know, this seems sort of like a particularly naughty problem to solve, given that schools are these places, you know, where like, everyone needs to be together. And that's exactly what we can't do right now. And, you know, we've heard how so much more than just learning is going to be lost in New York and Seattle, all over the country when these schools are shut down. So, I mean, how do you sustain community in a time like this? That's a really important question because I think social distancing is so important right now to stop the spread of COVID-19, but that doesn't mean we have to distance ourselves from each other's humanity. I mean, I think we need to learn a great lesson from this.

Not all great lessons are taught within the four walls of a classroom. Sometimes we can draw large lessons from people's activity and collective action for the greater good. And I think that we need to take a hard look at the lack of a social safety net in our country and see how we can do better to to treat the least among us because i think as long as we have such dramatic disparities in our society we're all at greater risk Thank you.