Within one week of opening its doors for on-campus classes, the University of North Carolina’s flagship Chapel Hill campus closed after discovering that more than 100 students had tested positive for COVID-19, pushing all students toward online instruction. The next day — August 18 — the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, canceled in-person instruction for at least two weeks for the same reason.
In Indiana, several K-12 school districts forced up to 500 students into quarantine within days of opening in early August.
Welcome to education amid COVID-19, where the number one lesson for schools opening in the fall during the pandemic will be flexibility and strategic planning for what many say is an inevitable spike in infections.
Since launching its plans to reopen, University of North Carolina officials said they “have emphasized that if we were faced with the need to change plans — take an off-ramp — we would not hesitate to do so, but we have not taken this decision lightly,” reads an Aug. 17 statement from the university’s communications office when it announced the closure.
By late August, numerous schools and universities welcomed students back to campuses with safety measures in place. But the question remains: Can they stay open as the pandemic continues without a cure or vaccine?
“Whatever you see, I can promise it will change,” said Dorothy Gjerdrum, St. Paul, Minnesota-based senior managing director public sector K-12 with Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. “Everybody is worried how we are going to do this. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about it.”
Temporary structures such as tents to help with social distancing and create smaller classroom settings, daily temperature-taking protocols, required masks among pupils and staff, closing of large gathering areas such as cafeterias, staggered schedules and more have all been a part of reopening strategies nationwide. School districts have been told to lean on guidance from federal and local health departments but have been charged with drafting individual plans for reopening — amid much criticism.
But many other schools took the opposite approach and remained closed.
Some school systems announced in July and August that they would halt re-openings, and called for remote learning for several months into as far as January 2021.
Others, hit by mounting pressure from teachers unions and parents, were forced to about-face on reopening. In Arizona in mid-August, teachers in several districts called out sick to protest reopening. New York City teachers in late August threatened to do the same. The Florida Education Association on July 20 filed a lawsuit against the state arguing it was unsafe to open schools.
What comes next for schools that opened doors is anybody’s guess, according to experts.
“Things change on a daily basis, and depending on who you listen to, it is more safe or less safe to open,” said Joe DesPlaines, a Brookfield, Wisconsin-based business continuity and crisis response consultant with District Mutual Insurance and Risk Management Services, which insures more than a dozen technical schools in Wisconsin.
“Who do we listen to? Even the health organizations have been inconsistent in their guidance. … You have an event that hasn’t happened in 100 years and you have no experts. Anybody who says they are an expert is full of baloney,” said Mr. DesPlaines.
“It’s a moving target,” said Phillip Dendy, chief compliance and risk officer for the University of Texas, whose system includes eight university campuses, which all reopened.
Every site “has some component where they have to be ready to pull back if that becomes necessary,” he said.
In its second posting since May, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July updated its guidance to schools, calling for social distancing and cleaning protocols, urging all school entities — universities or K-12 — to make changes to campus life and to stay nimble in the event of infections.
Monitoring the CDC guidelines, in addition to local infection numbers and hospitalizations, will be important for the institutions, said Melanie Bennett, Bethesda, Maryland-based risk management counsel for United Educators, a Reciprocal Risk Retention Group, which provides risk management consulting to more than 1,600 schools.
“Schools that have decided to resume on campus should really take a look at health and safety in their area,” she said. “What are governments saying? Does the municipality have sufficient public services for reopening?”
One best practice is a “scenario analysis” that takes into account best-case and worst-case scenarios that can guide schools in creating plans for what could happen if certain triggers occur, such as an uptick in infections, said Matt Hinton, a New York-based partner with Control Risks Group Holdings Ltd., which provides risk management services to K-12 districts, colleges and universities, and other organizations.
“If infections hit a certain level, transition to online,” he said, adding that preparing for options allows schools to better handle the risk of spread and disruption. “There should be no pausing to figure out what to do,” which was the case in March when schools closed abruptly, with little strategy in place, he said.
“You can potentially get ahead of those triggers and be proactive instead of reactive,” he said.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “trigger points” and local infection data in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Boston metropolitan area, will dictate next steps, as the campus in August planned to resume some in-class instruction, said Sandra Mitchell, the school’s director of the office of insurance.
“You have no choice but to be flexible,” she said. “Your plan is not set in stone; it’s a flow chart. If this happens you do this and then you have choices. That will dictate the decisions you have to make.”
