![Tiffany Dittrich, a longtime high school teacher in the White Bear Lake Area High School, spoke at Thursday's Education Minnesota press conference. She emphasized that school facilities don't have the physical space to properly socially distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was standing near thirty chairs, spaced out apart six feet, to demonstrate that a classroom couldn't physically handle a basic element of social distancing. ] aaron.lavinsky@startribune.com Education Minnesota released r](https://arc.stimg.co/startribunemedia/EBK7TN74KS7AK2YVUDC5KMVC7Y.jpg?&w=1080)
Forty-eight days. That's the amount of time one young patient had to be hospitalized at Children's Minnesota after contracting COVID-19.
Thankfully, that is the longest period — so far — that a child needed this level of care at the state's well-known pediatric medical center. And while the severity of the illness has been the exception, the lengthy stay offers a reality check as Gov. Tim Walz is expected to announce a decision July 30 on school reopening.
School-aged children appear to be at low risk of severe COVID, but that does not equate to no risk. In addition, at this point in the pandemic, there is "insufficient evidence" to say with certainty how readily children contract the virus and how contagious they are once they do, according to a new report from the prestigious National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
These findings are sobering, but not meant to be an argument against resuming in-school education this fall in some fashion. Instead, the Star Tribune Editorial Board agrees with the National Academies that the importance of a traditional classroom setting in educational outcomes and children's well-being necessitates trying to strike a balance. That means managing health risks and making smart, informed choices about when classroom instruction is safe and who would best benefit from it.
To succeed, this strategy will take flexibility, adjusted expectations and acknowledgment that reopening is not easy or risk-free. The U.S. has been setting new daily highs for COVID cases. How and when to reopen safely is a dauntingly complex decision.
Superintendents should not be put in a snow-day situation in which they eyeball the local weather, look at the forecast and make a call. Expert guidance is needed from state health and education officials, which is why a resolution passed by the Minnesota Senate last week calling on Walz to cede reopening authority to local school leaders was ill-advised. Here's a better approach, one emerging as a best practice nationally:
• Establish clear, robust guardrails from the state for local decisionmaking. This collaborative approach would allow flexibility at the local level yet have strong checks in place for COVID containment. Schools generally are looking at three scenarios: in-person learning, online only, or a mix of the two. State experts could provide thresholds for COVID community spread or decline that would require shifts to remote learning or would greenlight the expanding of classroom time. The thresholds would allow regions less hard-hit from COVID to resume more normal practices, while protecting students and teachers where the disease is spreading.
Guidance released by the state Education Department earlier this summer suggest that Minnesota is heading in this direction. It's important to note that several school leaders an editorial writer spoke to last week favored this approach. As one noted, "We're educators, not public health experts."
