The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Educators and state officials spent last summer engaged in a difficult conversation about whether and how to safely reopen schools. Now, a version of the same debate is ramping up again.
A majority of Vermont school districts have maintained some in-person education through the fall and winter. But the state has been pressing school districts to aim for a full return to classrooms for all students by the end of the school year — as soon as April.
The push comes as other steps have drawn criticism from educators. The state has no plans to prioritize teachers for the Covid-19 vaccine, while schools have been allowed to resume indoor, interscholastic athletic events. Meanwhile, Covid cases in schools have reached a record high.
“Everything that I’ve seen this year suggests that we, as a society, really value education and schools, and they are really essential to our society,” said Bibba Kahn, a French and Spanish teacher at Main Street Middle School in Montpelier. “And these decisions seemed to not jibe with that.”
Kahn, who was the 2020 Vermont Teacher of the Year, has written opinion pieces in VTDigger and USA Today about the state’s accelerated approach.
On this week’s podcast, she discusses how a full reopening would further tax teachers at a time when they’re already under stress. Plus, VTDigger education reporter Lola Duffort describes what’s behind the Scott administration’s reopening deadline. Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Bibba Kahn: I’m a World Languages teacher. Normally I teach fifth, seventh and eighth graders in my classroom. But this year, I am a support teacher in a pod, which means that I am with that sort of homeroom group of students throughout their school day. I am doing things like taking temperatures, and running our morning meeting, and other SEL lessons, supporting them with literacy and math. Even escorting students to the bathroom, so we can make sure that they’re not interacting with other pods, the way middle school kids like to do.
My classes are all virtual, asynchronous classes. The kids have a shortened day, and in the afternoon, I’m planning and preparing lessons in French that go on Google Classroom that they log on to from their pod room.
So you’ll be in a room with kids who are on computers with other teachers?
Bibba Kahn: Except they’re asynchronous, right? Because you can’t have 23 kids all on a Google Meet or something.
I will play a video of myself teaching a concept and then some assignments and they sort of work through those independently.
You’re not speaking live in conversation with the kids.
Bibba Kahn: No, not this year.
How does that change things?
Bibba Kahn: For foreign language, it’s huge. I am really trying to think of it as a glass-half-full sort of a situation. There’s less that I can do in terms of speaking and listening. I’m finding ways to do that. God bless Google for Education and all of their add-ons, they’re saving me.
I’m able to do less with speaking and listening. But there are so many amazing videos out there in the target language about various cultural aspects, and things that I don’t always have time for in class. I’m trying to work more of those things in.
But it is definitely a very different model. I don’t get to see my students. That’s been the trickiest part, encouraging them and supporting them when we don’t have any face to face time.
How are your students doing?
Bibba Kahn: I think they’re doing pretty well. I think we all experiencing February in Vermont, in the middle of a global pandemic that’s been going on for almost a year. I think that they miss their friends, and they miss hanging out with other people outside of our pod. But in terms of learning, they have been incredibly flexible and patient and willing to try new things. And I think that has been met with incredible efforts on the part of teachers to build relationships and personalized learning — having to reinvent their curriculum to fit within this sort of 6 feet apart, all facing one direction kind of thing. It’s not ideal, but we’re doing it. It’s working.
If that’s the glass-half-full side of things, what’s the flip side? What have you seen that the real challenges are?
Bibba Kahn: I think initially, our district, and I know districts across the state, had to sort of completely turn everything inside out to figure out how to do this. And it took months of work by all sorts of people. Our district is usually very hands off in the summer, but I spent a good part — and I know a lot of teachers did — sort of weighing in on schedules and how things would work and trying to figure out different spaces.
I teach in the gym; that’s where my pod is. We’ve got people in the woodshop, in the art room, all over the school, the cafeteria — just trying to figure out the space. That was a huge logistical hurdle. And then just every day, reinvention of that curriculum. Trying to figure out how to make lessons engaging without some of the experiential learning, or the project-based learning and the cooperative learning that, particularly in middle school, we really gravitate towards.
That takes a lot of work. And figuring out how to support the kids who aren’t meeting the standards, when we need to keep our distance and have a mask and all that kind of thing. That’s the flip side. It’s a challenge.
Back when you were doing all that planning work last summer, how were you feeling generally about being asked to come back to the school building?
Bibba Kahn: I think, probably like most educators, it was sort of all I thought about. I’m also a parent. So there is the trying to decide what was best for my children as well, and for me. I thought a lot about this, back and forth. But when the guidance came out, I thought, OK, we are layering so many different mitigation strategies in place, and our district is adhering to these with incredible fidelity. I got to the point where I think, this is the best that we can do. That was sort of where I got to in the fall.
When you came back, was it what you expected?
Bibba Kahn: I think I don’t know exactly what I expected. We were expecting the unexpected, I think. In some ways, it was easier, and it went more smoothly than I expected. The students showed tremendous flexibility and patience in terms of learning these new routines and procedures. I give them a lot of credit for that. I think I the sort of mental and emotional drain on educators came as a little bit of a surprise — just how much of an increase the workload was, plus that sort of emotional tax on us as well.
What I wasn’t really anticipating was just, every time a middle school student pushes back against a boundary — which is what they’re programmed to do, that’s their job as middle school students — and they don’t stay 6 feet apart, or they say they need a mask break or whatever. I’m not a health care professional or a public health expert. All I know is that these are the rules, and the rules are there to keep us safe. It is anxiety-provoking to sort of have to monitor those guidelines and those restrictions.
You’re balancing letting a kid be a kid, versus enforcing the health rules that have been handed down.
Bibba Kahn: Right, and trying to try to gauge, how safe is this? It’s not something I have expertise in.
I think everyone has a sort of an emotional tax of what’s going on right now. My parents live here in town, but I haven’t spent time with them since last March — all those kinds of things, educators are experiencing that too. Anecdotally, I would say we might be a little bit more cautious, because we are also aware of how much more exposure we have than somebody who’s from working from home.
VTDigger’s education reporter Lola Duffort has been tracking the school reopening debate since last year.
Late last summer, there was this widespread debate about reopening schools, bringing students and educators back into the buildings in person. And we kind of worked through it — Vermont did that, in some capacity. A lot of students and a lot of educators have been back in buildings. But it seems like recently, this conversation is ramping back up. Why?
Lola Duffort: Ramping back up for, I guess, maybe three reasons.
One is that Gov. Phil Scott has put out this aspiration. And I think it’s important to note that it is an aspiration — it’s not like he has said “you shall,” or implied in any way that this will be a mandate. But this aspiration out there that it would be great if all students were back full time in person in school by the end of the year, and ideally April.
Gov. Phil Scott [in 2021 inaugural address]: We have a lot of work to do to help every child recover from the learning opportunities that were lost. So, I’ve asked the Agency of Education, the Department of Health — working closely with school districts, teachers and pediatricians — to develop a plan to safely get every child in every district back into the classroom full-time before the end of the school year, and hopefully sometime in April.
Lola Duffort: April was put out there for several reasons. It’ll be warmer. So it’s possible to maybe do some more stuff outside, to open more windows. Ventilation becomes a little bit easier. And also, apparently, it’s a kind of parallel to this push that we’re seeing at the federal level, where President Joe Biden has said that he would like to see kids return for in person instruction at the K-8 level within his first 100 days. And that’s also come with promises of additional resources. So that’s point No. 1 is this April aspiration.
Number two, teachers were told that they would not be prioritized for the vaccine in this most recent phase, which means that they probably will not be vaccinated until late spring or summer at the earliest — unless we see a massive ramp up of vaccine distribution federally. So could that change? Yes. But based on what we’ve seen so far, and the timeline in front of us, teachers have basically been told: Sorry. You’re going to have to wait a really long time.
So those two things happened. And also, cases have been going up. That has increased the disruption that we’re seeing on the ground in schools. We’re seeing more schools close because of Covid cases. We’re just seeing the general anxiety about this increase.
These three factors together have meant that we are once again in Vermont having this conversation about quote-unquote reopening schools.
As this conversation plays out, what kind of data and information do we have to actually inform the decision-making? What did we learn from having schools open in some capacity throughout the fall, and even the first couple months of this year?
Lola Duffort: We have learned that, as suggested by research earlier on in the pandemic, it does not seem like a ton of transmission is occurring within schools. And that could be because of really robust mitigation measures. It could also be because of what we think might be the case, but we really don’t know for sure, which is that young kids are thought to be less likely to get Covid and pass it on.
Maybe the fact that we’re not seeing a ton of within school transmission is because of that, or it’s because of robust mitigation measures — or it’s both. And it’s kind of hard to disentangle the two, which is what makes it so difficult to have a conversation about what we should do next. Because it is hard to know for sure why we have been as successful as we have been.
A counter to that is, we do consistently see this pattern where, when a school experiences cases, it’s usually because they come in from the community, and not because the schools themselves are these hotspots of viral transmission. That doesn’t mean that within school transmission isn’t occurring — so you can’t tell a teacher that they’re safe.
I think there was this belief earlier on in the pandemic that transmission within schools would be vanishingly small, or really not a concern. And that’s obviously not the case. We are seeing within school transmission.
And I think a kind of really tricky part of this whole debate is that from a public health perspective, it really does make sense to keep schools open with good mitigation measures in place because they don’t drive community transmission. But what that ignores is the very real risk we ask the people within those buildings to assume. What’s best for public health is not necessarily what’s best for a lot of the individual humans who are in that building.
You’re saying educators here are just making a lot of sacrifices in order to make this happen.
Lola Duffort: Exactly. They’re making enormous sacrifices. And I’m increasingly hearing, the sacrifices that educators have made are being in a lot of ways used against them. Because we have been successful at keeping schools from being these hotbeds of transmission, that we keep asking more. And there’s definitely this feeling of just enormous stress within the teaching community.
What about in terms of the impact to students, and to the actual process of learning? I know that was a big part of the push to bring students back in the first place. Do we have any information yet about: Was it worth it? Do we know how different it’s been having them back in person, as opposed to doing remote learning?
Lola Duffort: Every student that I’ve talked to who’s doing either hybrid or in person learning is grateful for the amount of in person learning that they are doing. They’re aware of the amount of work that a lot of their teachers are doing, and tend to be pretty explicitly grateful for it.
But there’s also, I think — no one’s having a good time. Some kids are thriving, and actually enjoy the extra flexibility that they get with a hybrid schedule. A lot of kids are also incredibly disengaged and depressed and struggling and feeling like they do not have enough one-on-one attention, enough support and enough structure. And so I think it’s really variable.
As this conversation is ramped back up, what have we learned about what this would actually look like — the actual nuts and bolts of taking another step towards a fuller reopening than what we have now?
Lola Duffort: When we talk about what a fuller reopening in Vermont looks like, what we’re mostly talking about is high school and middle school. Because most elementary students are back full time in person already.
As complicated as all this stuff is, at the end of the day, it mostly boils down to this 6 feet distancing requirement, which is in place for middle and high school students. At the K-5 level, it’s really 3 feet. That just means you can have more kids in a classroom. That’s why we’re seeing a lot more kids fully in person in the elementary grades, and less at the high school level. So if you want to bring more kids back in in the upper grades, what you have to do is give on the distancing requirement.
We’re seeing this debate take place on the national stage as well, not just in Vermont. And the problem with the distancing requirement is, we’ve basically had a year of public health messaging that has said, distance, distance, distance. Six feet is this sacred number. And a lot of people on the pro reopening side, including a lot of scientists, will point out that 6 feet was always kind of arbitrary. It’s not like we have good science that says, 6 feet will protect you, 5 feet will not, or 4 feet will not.
So it is rational to be like, well, why don’t we try 5 feet if that’s what will get all the kids back in? But at the same time, because we do not know what is the safe distance, a lot of people are reasonably very scared about pushing it. Because we have had the success that we have had with the mitigation measures that we have. And so it stands to reason that if we relax them, we’ll probably have less success. The question is, how much less? Will we see cases take up a little bit or will we see them explode? It’s really kind of impossible to know.
I asked Bibba Kahn, the Main Street Middle School teacher, what she thought of the April reopening idea.
Bibba Kahn: In my experience, in my district, we have all these structures and schedules and mitigation strategies in place, and they seem to be working.
We have roughly 20% of our student body who chose to be remote this year, and we created a whole virtual option for them. If we needed to bring those folks in, I’m not sure that we would be able to do that without compromising our mitigation strategies, and having kids closer together. I don’t know that we have the staffing or the space to be able to figure out how to keep our current model, to expand our current model, to accommodate everyone.
I think what’s true for a lot of schools across the state is that if we could have done it, we would have done it in the fall. I don’t think anyone’s choosing to have hybrid because they think it’s the easier way to go. So figuring out those logistics seems really challenging.
The other thing is, because there would be all these logistical challenges in that you would have to reshuffle students in order to accommodate more people in the building — one of the things that have been working really, really well is that teachers have been able to sort of forge relationships, even with masks and the distance, with these students. We’ve all been through a rough year, and having those relationships as the foundation of everything we do is really, really important. I worry that with the reshuffling, students would end up with a new teacher in April and May with whom they may not have that relationship. How does that serve everybody’s needs? I just have some concerns about how it will actually play out, I guess.
What would the next few months of schooling look like in your ideal scenario?
Bibba Kahn: Well, my ideal scenario would be that Covid would just pack up its bags. I’d be back in my classroom, playing games and singing songs.
I think what my ideal scenario is around reopening is to have the public health perspective be joined with the experience of administrators and educators, who are living this every day, and really try to come up with solutions that make sense — on a public health basis, but also for educating kids. I think also accelerating the vaccination of essential workers, including teachers, would be really important to that. I don’t necessarily have any specific recommendations, because I think every context is really different. But I think combining those perspectives and having everyone at the table is really important.
What we have learned is that education is a real priority, and we need to not think about, what’s the least amount that we can do in order to support that? — but, how can we marshall all of our resources? How can we really support the important work of educators?
