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1/ Why K-6 schools should be open and universities/colleges should be closed: a short essay. @fordnation @Sflecce
2/ The virus spreads when people are indoors and in close proximity. The more people with whom any individual comes into contact, the more likely the disease is to spread and the harder it is to track/trace source of infection.
3/ In k-6, students mostly stay in the same classroom. If you can keep them well-enough spaced, give them visors, eat in own class, etc the number of ppl they interact with will remain limited, chances for spread of disease low.
4/ In universities/colleges, problem is not just that classrooms are designed to put people much closer together: it’s that students share multiple classrooms with completely different sets of people in a single day. Chances for super-spreaders massively multiplied.
5/ And that’s before we get to the issue of residences and the greater propensity for 18-24 years olds to socialize in large groups (ie party), which may be a bigger issue than classroom design & intermingling btwn classes. Cdn unis are *badly* underestimating this problem.
6/ Basically, there are ways you can imagine keeping risky interactions (being within 2m of another person) to 15-20 people per day in K-6. Even with vastly reduced class sizes, it is much harder to imagine uni/college interactions under 100. Totally. different levels of risk.
7/ Plus of course, the average age of instructors at unis/colleges is much higher than in K-6. A not-unimportant risk factor both in terms of spread an in terms of potential fatalities.
8/ Secondary school is in a kind of intermediate state. Classes larger K-6, smaller than unis/colleges - but maybe even more movement between classes each day, so more mixing. Not nearly as simple to re-open as K-6.
9/ Now, it is reasonable to ask questions about how small classes have to be in order to be safe. I don’t have a simple answer to that (in part because it depends on square footage of classrooms, which can vary a lot, and other factors like available PPE).
10/ But the Israeli example is a cautionary one. They got their new case level down to 35/day in May (about half ON's current per-capita rate), then decided on a full re-open. Israel has among the OECD’s largest avg class sizes (27 in primary, 28 in secondary).
11/ So guess what happened? The virus ripped through Israeli schools, and within eight weeks, new cases per day increased 50x. Lesson: overly crowded classrooms can be a massive disease vector. People will die if governments do not pay attention to class size in K-12.
12/ Now there’s another aspect to think about here. Which is that keeping K-6 students out of school, even part-time, has a really big impact on labour market participation of parents (mostly women). That has broader economic impacts in terms of $ earned, taxes paid.
13/ Which means: re-opening K-6 (safely, of course) has a much bigger economic multiplier than re-opening universities/colleges. And therefore is more deserving of public investment. (Again, 7-12 is an intermediate case, harder to judge cost-benefit).
14/ Also, years of educational research tells us that the younger a student is when their education is interrupted, the worse the effects (and the worse the equity effects for kids from underprivileged backgrounds). Another reason for prioritizing K6 > 7-12 > PSE
15/ Long story short: with a little bit of space and more teachers, we can and should re-open the K-6 system fully & safely. That’s where we will get best bang for buck, where the science says our best bet lies. And it’s where the priority should be. Fin. @fordnation @sflecce
