Omicron School Closures are Needless and Tragic
The children harmed by school closures may never catch up with those who lived where schools were open: a gap that is widening further.
The science is now settled: prolonged school closures during the pandemic have disrupted the education of a generation of children, without making students or teachers safer. From lower test scores to increasing mental health challenges, closures have increased inequality in American K-12 education. And yet, in response to the Omicron wave, schools have closed across the country.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reporting a surge of COVID-19 cases due to the Omicron variant, the United States has new tools for mitigating these health risks. Interventions to protect public health should appropriately balance the potential risk of severe infection to children with the clear social, emotional, and educational costs of prolonged school closures. Moreover, federal, state, and local policymakers should act quickly to use unspent federal emergency K-12 education aid to immediately help children recover learning losses that have occurred during the pandemic. As of December 31st, states had $154 billion in unspent funds.
Growing evidence of the harm caused by prolonged school closures
Evidence continues to mount that the widespread and, in many cases, prolonged public school closures that have occurred since March 2020 have had a serious and negative effect on a generation of children and adolescents.
A new NBER working paper found that student test scores declined during the 2020–21 school year, and that “declines were larger in school districts with less in-person instruction.” The authors warned that this could exacerbate inequality since school districts with larger populations of minority children had less access to in-person learning.
An advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General reported an alarming increase of mental health challenges among American children, which was exacerbated by the pandemic:
“In early 2021, emergency department visits in the United States for suspected suicide attempts were 51% higher for adolescent girls and 4% higher for adolescent boys compared to the same time period in early 2019.45 Moreover, pandemic-related measures reduced in-person interactions among children, friends, social supports, and professionals such as teachers, school counselors, pediatricians, and child welfare workers. This made it harder to recognize signs of child abuse, mental health concerns, and other challenges.”
The Surgeon General also warned that “socioeconomically disadvantaged children and adolescents… are two to three times more likely to develop mental health conditions than their peers with higher socioeconomic status.” A new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office indicated that school closures have had negative effects on children’s behavioral health.
These serious harms of prolonged school closures were predictable. Indeed, we wrote extensively about them in the spring and summer of 2020. Now that vaccines and promising treatments are now available, one might assume that the nation’s public schools are entirely focused on addressing learning losses and helping American children get back on track. But widespread public school closures that continue in 2022 suggest that many of the nation’s education leaders continue to prioritize mitigating potential health risks to ending and reversing the well-documented harms of prolonged school closures.
Public schools across the nation continue to close
During the early months of the 2021–22 school year, many public schools across the nation have closed temporarily in response to virus outbreaks and to address reported stress among teachers and students. In November, the Wall Street Journal reported that thousands of schools have closed for periods during the fall to provide mental health days for teachers and students. In early December, the New York Times detailed how several school districts are closing schools on Fridays, which has put many parents in a pinch to make childcare arrangements.
According to Burbio, a company that has been tracking U.S. public schools’ operating status during the pandemic, over 7,000 public schools nationwide were closed in January. As of early February, more than 500 public schools nationwide experienced at least one day of closure. It is possible that more public schools may close during the current semester due to community infections, staffing shortages and teachers unions’ calls to shift to remote instruction.
Understanding the health risks to children and new tools to prevent and treat the virus
State data show many children are testing positive for the virus. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than 600,000 children tested positive for the virus during the week of February 3rd, a reduction from mid-January when more than 1.1 million positive tests were recorded.
The AAP continues to call for in-person learning, which it has recommended since June 2020. As of February, AAP reported that “0.1%-1.5% of all their child COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalization,” and “0.00%-0.01% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death.”
In December, national public health officials pointed out that the omicron variant was less severe than prior variants of the virus. On December 29th, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky discussed current trends and put this data into context:
“In a few short weeks Omicron has rapidly increased across the country, and we expect will continue to circulate in the coming weeks. While cases have substantially increased from last week, hospitalizations and deaths remain comparatively low right now.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the president, stated, “All indications point to a lesser severity of omicron versus delta.”
The United States now has a growing number of tools to prevent and treat the virus, including widely available vaccines and booster shots. As FREOPP’s Gregg Girvan reasoned, the FDA’s decision to approve promising therapies to treat COVID-19 should further reduce the risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death. In addition, the FDA expanded the emergency use authorization for monoclonal antibody therapies in December to include infants and children under age 12 for treating those at high-risk.
National leaders and public health experts call for schools to remain open
Notably, even national leaders and public health experts who supported aggressive lockdowns and school closures in 2020 are now advocating keeping schools open. President Joe Biden strongly endorsed open schools in a December 21st speech:
“Today, we know more and we have more resources to keep those schools open. We can — you can get 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated — a tool we didn’t have until last month. Today, we don’t have to shut down schools because of a case of COVID-19. Now, if a student tests positive, other students can take the test and stay in the classroom if they’re not infected rather than closing the whole school or having to quarantine. We can keep our K-through-12 schools open, and that’s exactly what we should be doing.”
Brown University School of Public Health Dean Ashish Jha, who in March 2020 said “we should close all the schools,” has since reversed his position and called strongly for reopening:
“We know how to keep schools open, we know how to keep them safe. This really shouldn’t even be on the table. I’m disappointed to see this happening…. We know that for kids being in school is the right thing for them, for their mental health, for their education. And we have all sorts of tools to keep schools open so I don’t really understand why school districts are [closing schools].”
States and school districts should use unspent federal funding now
It remains to be seen whether public school districts across the nation heed this advice. One thing is clear: state and school districts have unspent funding available that should be used to help students recover learning losses and endure any current or future schooling disruptions.
Since March 2020, Congress has appropriated and the Department of Education has awarded more than $180 billion to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. The U.S. The Department of Education maintains a “transparency portal” that tracks whether ESSER funds are being spent.
As of December 31, 2021, state education agencies had reported spending $30.4 billion of the $184 billion in ESSER funds that had been awarded to date, or approximately 17 percent. Nationally, $154 billion in ESSER funds remain unspent. The below table shows a state-by-state breakdown of ESSER fund expenditures. Ten states have spent 10 percent or less of their ESSER funds. Nevada has spent just 7 percent of these relief funds, the lowest percentage in the nation.
As we have previously explained, states and school districts may have spent more than these amounts. Last March, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department of Education’s system for tracking data may not accurately reflect the rate at which states and school districts are using these funds. But with $154 billion reported unspent, most public school systems have significant funding available that could be used during the 2021–22 school year.
Under federal law and the Department of Education’s guidelines, the majority of ESSER funds must be distributed by state education agencies to local education agencies (which include school districts, local boards of education, and schools) through the Title I formula. Local education agencies have broad discretion for how to spend the funds, including to assist with pandemic-related schooling disruptions.
It remains unclear how local education agencies have used these funds. For example, the Board of Education for the City of Chicago has received more than $2.9 billion in ESSER funds. This amounts to more than $8,000 in extra funding for each of the children enrolled in the school district. In early January, Chicago’s public schools were closed due to a teachers strike after the Chicago Teachers Union “voted to refuse orders to work in-person.”
During the 2021–22 school year, education leaders and local education agencies should act proactively to use available funding to help keep schools open, such as by using unspent funds to address staffing gaps and other practical challenges such as a shortage of school bus drivers. Moreover, local education agencies should set aside and provide funds directly to students to access tutoring and other outside of school learning opportunities to recover from prolonged school closures.
To be clear, unspent ESSER funds are just one source of available emergency funds that could be used to help students during the 2021–22 school year and to recover learning losses.
States and local governments also received $350 billion in federal funds through the American Rescue Plan that can be used for education.
For governors and state legislators, using some of the available federal funding to improve children’s learning opportunities and to recover from the pandemic should be a priority. Some states are already doing this. For example, Ohio launched a new initiative to establish an “after school child enrichment educational savings account.” In January, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey announced a “COVID-19 Educational Recovery Benefit program,” to provide $7,500 grants for “child care, transportation, online tutoring and tuition,” for the 2022–23 school year. These programs should be models for states across the country.
School districts are out of excuses for keeping schools closed
The American public has been enduring the pandemic for nearly two years. American children have suffered significant harm due to prolonged school closures and other disruptions. The extent of these social, emotional, and educational harms continues to become clearer as researchers detail the extent of the damage that has occurred.
As communities across the United States react to the current increased spread of COVID-19 due in part to the Omicron variant, school leaders should heed the recommendations of President Biden and public health experts to remain open. The United States now has several tools to prevent and treat the virus, including highly-effective vaccines and promising therapies to treat those at high-risk of serious illness. The risks of prolonged school closures remain greater than the public health risks of the virus.
Moreover, the nation’s public school systems should use the $154 billion in unspent ESSER funds to remain open and help students recover learning losses that occurred during the pandemic. For their part, state lawmakers should use some of the $350 billion in American Rescue Plan funds that were awarded to state and local governments to assist disadvantaged children, including by providing tutoring or after school enrichment ESAs.
The children harmed by school closures may never catch up with those who lived in states where schools were open. We must not let that gap widen further.
