Pandemic Response

Our pandemic response must prioritize keeping school buildings open with healthy children and staff inside them.

Following the emerging research on mitigation practices that actually work is essential. A successful public school system response to the pandemic relies on:

  • Keeping healthy kids and staff in school buildings

  • Ensuring adequate staffing and planning for shortages

  • Appropriate allocation of (often scarce) resources



Keeping Healthy Students and Staff in School Buildings

APE advocated for:

  • "Test to Stay" beginning in August.

  • Procurement for additional rapid tests from Amazon, to address test shortages for Test to Stay implementation

  • Change in quarantining for students and staff as per new CDC guidelines [cite]

  • More clarity on how APS would implement school closures as per SB1303

  • Making SB1303 permanent

APS’ Response:

  • Meetings held with APS Emergency Manager to discuss.Test to Stay and indication that APS wanted to pursue it but lacked necessary tests.

  • APS isn’t tracking its own data, even though it would likely show that TTS would be safe and extremely beneficial to many students.

  • APS not following CDC guidance for quarantining and timeliness for returning to school.

  • More recently, despite assurances, APS is not participating in the Test-to-Stay Pilot program in Virginia



Ensure Adequate Staffing in Schools


APE advocated for:

  • Planning for and aggressive hiring of additional substitutes teachers

  • Planning for how to close specific schools (not the entire system) if there are significant shortages

  • Using Central Admin staff to cover staffing shortages, as per Fairfax plan

APS’ Response:

  • APS closed Thursday January 6, not due to weather but due to staffing issues because of neighboring jurisdictions’ closures. Review of the number of substitutes needed for January 6 shows variability across schools in terms of the need for subs. Many schools needed only 1-3 substitutes, while others needed 10+. This suggests that some schools could have remained open that day.

  • APS increased pay for substitutes and offered a bonus. This is a welcome step. However, more aggressive recruitment is warranted.

 

Ensure Appropriate Allocation of Resources

APE advocated for:

  • A redo of ESSR funding application because it was incorrect. our analysis demonstrated APS was spending nowhere near half our allocated funds were allocated for learning loss as they were intended to be.

  • Prioritizing school staff for student-facing positions and activities that address learning loss and prioritize the needs of struggling special-education students

APS’ response:

  • Most of the money was spent on VLP, which serves roughly 3% of the APS student population, and has been criticized roundly for its rocky rollout.

  • APS has been doing "Code 1" closures on snow days (this past week), meaning staff do not report to work either in person or virtually. This past week, many IEP meetings that were previously scheduled had to be canceled due to the Code 1. Rescheduling these meetings, which often involve 10 or more individuals and typically require working parents to take time out of their work days, can be very challenging. These meetings are also incredibly important to meeting children’s needs and, in some cases, keeping them in school. IEP meetings have been conducted virtually for the past 2 years.

  • There is a shortage of rapid tests, yet APS continues to waste them on ongoing asymptomatic daily testing of fully vaccinated athletes. This is inconsistent with CDC guidance--vaccinated individuals don’t have to quarantine, so why is APS testing them?

 

Next steps including pushing APS to:

  • Reallocate unused VLP resources, given that many students have returned to in-person learning and many VLP positions are currently--and will likely remain--unfilled.

  • Repurpose of Rapid Tests for test to stay and ending the practice of testing athletes.

  • In the event of future weather-related closures, switch to Code 2 closures to allow IEP and other virtual meetings essential for special education students to go forward.

  • Update quarantine guidelines to reflect most recent CDC guidance.

  • Adopt Test-to-Stay policy

  • Ask the County for help with collecting and managing data as well as procuring necessary resources.