Teachers group to fight reopening NC elementary schools. NCAE says move unsafe.
Citing COVID-19 concerns, the North Carolina Association of Educators is asking teachers to lobby school districts not to reopen elementary schools for full-time, in-person instruction.
Gov. Roy Cooper announced Thursday that he’s allowing school districts to reopen elementary schools, starting Oct. 5, under a “minimal social distancing” option called Plan A that allows all students to be on campus daily. It eliminates the current requirement that elementary schools reduce capacity to maintain social distancing in classrooms.
At an emergency town hall meeting Thursday night, NCAE leaders told the 1,000 virtual attendees that Cooper’s decision endangers students and school employees. Bryan Proffitt, NCAE’s vice president, said they’re now being “forced to fight against our principals, our school boards and our school district administrators” to keep schools from adopting Plan A.
“I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that the strategy has to be that we have to fight locally,” Proffitt said. “You are going to have to push your school board. The decision is now in the hands of school boards. It is not in the governor’s hands anymore, he relinquished that today.”
“It is in the hands of school boards so we are going to have to push our school boards for the safest possible conditions, and if that means you’ve got seven people on your school board, you’ve got to get four people to vote the way you want.”
Some teachers advocate going on strike
NCAE is also asking school employees around the state to fill out by next week an online survey saying how far they’re willing to go to prevent elementary schools from reopening.
If enough employees, particularly teachers, refuse to work it would tax school districts’ ability to find enough substitutes to reopen elementary schools under Plan A. Teachers aren’t allowed under state law to strike, but they can call in sick or request alternatives to working on campus.
Proffitt said now is the time for school employees to organize. NCAE is the state’s largest school employees association but its membership has declined over the years.
“People in the chat are talking about we need to go on strike,” Proffitt said as he asked for people to fill out the survey. “Whether you want to go on strike, whether you want to get your school board to do the right thing or whether you want to win a vote in November, all of those things require exactly the same thing y’all.”
NCAE has had enough influence to get dozens of school districts to shut down schools for a day in 2018 and 2019 to let teachers protest in Raleigh. NCAE members also helped persuade the majority of school districts to begin this school year with only online classes.
School districts weigh elementary school plans
School districts are now weighing whether to take advantage of Plan A.
“While we appreciate the option to open our elementary schools under the Governor’s Plan A, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools will continue to work with local and state health officials, as well as the ABC Science Collaborative, to monitor the science and determine when and how to safely re-open,” Jeff Nash, that district’s spokesman, said in an email Friday.
Durham Public Schools and the Wake County school system are also getting advice from the ABC Science Collaborative, a partnership of 50 school districts and Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
The Durham school board on Thursday will get results from a survey on what families, students and employees think about remote learning and whether they want in-person learning, according to Chip Sudderth, a district spokesman.
The Wake County school board is expected to discuss the new state option at a meeting next week.
State says elementary students less at risk
Many elementary school students haven’t had face-to-face classes since Cooper ordered school buildings closed in March to try to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Cooper previously allowed school districts to reopen under a Plan B option, which has “moderate social distancing” restrictions that limit the number of students who can ride school buses and be on campus. But he also allowed districts to use Plan C, which is online classes only.
The capacity restrictions mean that schools using Plan B are only able to offer students in-person classes a few days a week or every other week or two. The rest of the time they’re getting online classes.
But the last month of virtual school has produced a growing number of complaints from parents and Republican politicians that virtual learning isn’t working, especially for younger students and special-needs students.
On Thursday, Cooper and Mandy Cohen, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Services, cited positive trends in coronavirus metrics for easing the elementary school restrictions. Cohen also said the benefits of in-person learning outweigh the risk for younger children.
“As we look at the risk, there also seems to be just a different way that the virus is interacting with our younger kids,” Cohen said. “They seem to get COVID less often, they get less severely sick and they transmit it less often.”
Cooper, a Democrat, is not yet allowing middle schools and high schools to switch to Plan A.
Elementary schools that switch to Plan A will still have to follow new safety protocols such as requiring students and employees to pass daily temperature checks and health screenings before they’re allowed on campus. Students and staff will also have to wear face coverings on school buses and at school.
Other new measures are in place such as prohibiting assemblies and other large gatherings, encouraging students to wash their hands more often, and doing more frequent cleaning of high-touch areas.
NCAE says Plan A unsafe
But NCAE leaders say dropping the requirement to reduce elementary school capacity is “flirting with danger.” Even though children may be at less risk from COVID-19, many school employees fear catching the virus and spreading it to at-risk family members.
“Plan A was not a plan that we feel very safe about,” NCAE president Tamika Walker Kelly said at Thursday’s meeting. “We have very real concerns about the execution of Plan A in our school districts. COVID is very real.”
Attendees at Thursday’s NCAE meeting were told not to feel guilty about being reluctant to return for in-person classes.
“We have to definitely push back when people tell us that because we don’t want to be in school that means that we don’t care, because y’all know that is not the case,” said Meredith Licht, president of the Transylvania County Association of Educators. “We know we’d rather be doing those things. We’d rather be in school, but it’s not safe right now so we have to push back.
“But it’s normal, friends. It’s normal to feel scared. It’s normal to feel all of these negative feelings, all of these hard, heavy feelings.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 12:24 PM with the headline "Teachers group to fight reopening NC elementary schools. NCAE says move unsafe.."
