Several Arkansas lawmakers on Tuesday peppered state education and health officials with questions about protecting teachers returning to their classrooms next month amid the covid-19 pandemic.
Johnny Key, secretary of the state Department of Education, said his agency worked with the state Department of Health to create the Arkansas Ready for Learning initiative.
"From the American Academy of Pediatrics, all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with the goal of having students physically present in the school," he told the House and Senate education committees in a briefing about the Ready for Learning initiative.
"That aligns with what the governor has said for weeks," Key said, referring to Gov. Asa Hutchinson. "The governor has said we need to be in school, we need to have our kids in school, we need to be ready for that and planning for that."
Similar sentiments were expressed in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday by President Donald Trump and other administration officials, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. They pressed for the physical reopening of schools this fall.
"We're very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open," Trump said at a forum at the White House, according to The New York Times. "It's very important. It's very important for our country. It's very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we're going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall."
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Trump and administration officials argued that the social, psychological, economic and educational costs of keeping children at home any longer would be worse than the virus itself. But, the Times said, they offered no concrete proposals or new financial assistance to states and localities struggling to restructure academic settings, staffs and programs that were never intended to keep children 6 feet apart or cope with the requirements of combating a virus that has killed more than 130,000 Americans.
The Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education on June 4 directed school districts to prepare an education program for the coming school year that relies on face-to-face and online instruction with the flexibility to blend them and to pivot from one to the other.
The coronavirus pandemic caused Hutchinson to close campuses to 470,000 public school students in March for what turned out to be the rest of the 2019-20 school year. Students and teachers did schoolwork from home, using paper packets and online lessons, although that was sometimes hindered by a lack of computer devices in some homes.
Key said Tuesday that some people have questioned whether the state is going to require wearing masks in public schools.
"The guidance has been age 10 and up it's recommended, but it's not mandated," Key said. "We have not issued that mandate. But we also have told districts if you want to create a policy that requires masks, you could do that at the local level. ... We also are seeing districts and school boards taking that up as well."
The policy should be practical, feasible and appropriate for a child of adolescent developmental stage, he said.
"That's why 10 [years old] and up was important because the practicality and developmental appropriateness for children under the age of 10 in all those settings was something the Health Department and Department of Education looked at and ... that was not something we could recommend," Key said.
Sen. Linda Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, said she's worried about the health and well-being of teachers.
"Is there going to be PPE [personal protective equipment] available for all of them to protect their health as well as the health of kids?" she asked.
Key replied, "Yes, ma'am."
The school districts will provide masks, gloves and sanitizing equipment and chemicals, he said.
Chesterfield pressed Key further.
"Is it mandated that individuals in the classroom acting as teachers or bus drivers wear PPE?"
Key said: "We have not issued mandates for mask wearing. The guidance is that it is strongly recommended."
Chesterfield asked why the state won't require teachers and bus drivers to wear masks.
Don Adams, director of the Center for Local Public Health at the Health Department, said, "At this point, it is strongly recommended, and the districts have the option of requiring that and ... we would encourage them to require all of their teachers and staff to wear masks."
Chesterfield replied, "Okey-dokey, and that's very troubling to me."
Rep. Reginald Murdock, D-Marianna, said he's received at least 60 emails from teachers across the state who have told him that they don't want to return to the classroom.
"A district can choose to mandate masks and therefore, if I have to go back to work, then I'm susceptible to their choice, so their choice affects my health, [and] that scares me," he said in recounting what he's heard from these teachers.
State officials need to address this matter, Murdock said.
"If the people on the front line do not have the confidence, then where are our children going to get it? If our faculty and staff [are] scared and they are fearful ... we have to somehow gain their confidence," he said. "I don't have all the answers to that, but that's certainly a concern."
Rep. Jon Eubanks, R-Paris, said he's heard teachers are worried about their health in returning to the classroom.
He questioned whether school districts expect a lot of teachers to retire, not return to work or use their sick leave to avoid returning to the classroom because of concerns about their health.
Key said districts typically use the spring to determine whether teachers are going to return for the coming school year.
"Do I anticipate just an exodus of teachers because of that? ... You may have some teachers that do," he said.
But, Key said, "I don't anticipate statewide it is going to be a mass exodus. It could be something that affects a local district a little more severely, depending on the size of the district. We have to be ready to help identify ways to help those districts fill in those gaps with qualified people to be there."
Key, who serves on the board of trustees for the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, said he's not been notified about a big rush of teachers filing to retire.
Afterward, Arkansas Teacher Retirement System Executive Director Clint Rhoden said he has been closely monitoring retirements this year out of concern there might be a rush to retirement because of uncertainty around the pandemic, but that so far there have actually been fewer retirements compared with the same time a year ago.
For fiscal 2020, which ended June 30, "we had 2,591 retirements, compared to the prior fiscal year ... which had 2,753 retirements," Rhoden said.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, asked state officials who gets quarantined if a student in a classroom tests positive for covid-19.
"We have criteria for what we consider a close contact" to the positive case, Adams said.
"So any close contact to that positive case would be required to be quarantined for 14 days from the last date of contact with that positive case," he said. The definition of a close contact is within 6 feet for at least 15 minutes of cumulative time throughout the day, he said.
Officials work to find a positive case's close contacts and try to immediately exclude them from the environment and recommend they get tested, Adams said.
Elliott asked officials about the guidelines for sanitizing or disinfecting classrooms at the end of each school day.
Adams said all frequently touched surfaces should be disinfected on a very regular basis.
"But we know that close contact and breathing each other's air is the primary way that covid is transmitted from one person to another," he said. "It's not that it can't transmit through surfaces. But that's not near as a big of concern as breathing someone's breath or respiratory droplets."
Elliott questioned Key on whether he expects communities will be notified if a teacher or a student tests positive for covid-19. She said she doesn't expect the person's name to be disclosed.
"I don't know the answer to that, senator," Key said. "I do know that the protocol that the Health Department follows, we have been communicating that. It is going to be communicated to the school, so then the question becomes, do we leave it to that school district to communicate that to the community, or is that communicated from a state level? That's something that we will add to our list to talk to the [Health Department] about."
Rep. LeAnne Burch, D-Monticello, said she's worried about isolated school districts having to wait too long to get results of tests for the virus.
Adams said the turnaround time for test results with commercial labs is several days because those labs have a backlog with the growth of cases across the nation, and that creates challenges for quarantining and isolating individuals to stop transmission.
The Health Department has a laboratory with an increased capacity for processing samples and a faster turnaround time, and its priority is for samples from nursing homes, jails, congregate settings and other certain cases, he said.
"We are prioritizing education in the state of Arkansas. Let's prioritize health and the results of those tests," Burch said.
Information for this article was contributed by Cynthia Howell of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.