Thanks to the coronavirus, we’re in the midst of a huge learning curve, and our schools are part of the learning process.
How do you successfully switch from a 150-year tradition of in-classroom instruction to ‘remote learning’?
In particular, how do you make that switch in a society that expects both parents — or each single parent — to have a full-time job, from the time a child reaches, say, three years of age, and gets enrolled at a childcare facility? Yes, some parents hold out until the child enters Kindergarten at age five, but that’s not necessarily the typical pattern. (A few families choose to homeschool for the entire period of compulsory schooling; again, not the normal pattern.)
We have built up a system, especially since the 1960s, that expects our public schools and daycare centers to entertain our children with educational activities, while both Mom and Dad are out collecting their paychecks at essential or non-essential jobs. Many of those jobs relate to health care.
At the moment, the system is getting slammed by COVID-19.
The number of reported infections among Archuleta County residents has grown by 28 cases over the past two weeks, but the per capital rate is half what we are seeing in La Plata County, right next door. For those who enjoy graphic representations, here’s one of the curves displayed on San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH) on their website, this morning…
This is a detail of the chart on the SJBPH dashboard, showing newly-reported COVID cases between the end of June and November 12. There have been additional cases reported since November 12. As we see, the growth of new cases in La Plata County (purple bars) is significantly greater than the case growth in Archuleta County (turquoise bars.) La Plata County is also seeing new cases among its visitors.
Here’s Michael Murphy, interim CEO for Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, speaking during a press conference organized by SJBPH on October 30. Mercy is is an 82-bed, acute-care hospital, and part of Centura Health, a network of 17 hospitals and 14 affiliate hospital locations based out of Centennial, Colorado.
“We’ve been looking at the trends across the state since March, and continue to evaluate those and try to come up with best practices, and sharing information as we’ve gone through this. So we’ve had this incredible learning opportunity that we’ve benefited from, as a system. And I guess, most importantly, as we look at the numbers continue to increase across the state, our ability within Centura, across the 17 hospitals, how we can move resources.
“So we feel very confident that, as the numbers increase, the capacity and our ability to meet the challenges is still very much in place, and robust around that.
“However, to echo some of the earlier comments, with the holidays approaching, I think we really have to be very diligent and mindful about our attendance at in-person, indoor gatherings — even those with families and friends… Unfortunately, these environments have the potential to become significant spreading events. We know this virus can be a silent spreader, with the infectious peak occurring during the pre-symptomatic phases, and many individuals being asymptomatic out there. So I think it’s incredibly important to emphasize the limiting of our exposure by avoiding extended family gatherings, and to think about that. Even small gatherings with family members outside of our intimate families are areas for potential spread…
“We continue to have top priority of our own caregivers and keeping them safe, following both the Colorado Department of Public Health [CDPHE] and Centers for Disease Control [CDC] guidelines, in terms of how we work with our teams, to maintain their safety as well as that of our patients.
“The hospital continues to be diligent about limiting visitors to the hospital — only when absolutely necessary. That’s a key piece, as we look forward. We look forward to being a partner with all our healthcare providers and community agencies in the area, to try and keep a handle on this.”
One part of the problem CEO Michael Murphy did not specifically address here, is the importance of in-person school operations to Mercy and other essential services. As noted on Friday in Part Two, Durango School District 9-R sent out a letter to parents on Tuesday, November 10, that reads in part:
…We will be shifting ALL students in all models to full remote learning beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, November 11, 2020, continuing through the winter break, which ends on January 4, 2021. Understanding the difficulties that this may create for families, the decision to move the entire district to remote instruction is a difficult one. We encourage you to think about how this will work for your family, perhaps identifying another family who has practiced the public health safety guidelines issued by our local health authorities, to reduce the burden and provide remote learning support for younger children.
Preschool is also canceled at this time through Thanksgiving break…
This decision is indeed a difficult one, knowing that the ability of a hospital like Mercy Regional to provide the highest level of care depends upon being fully staffed. A hospital’s capacity to deal with a pandemic depends not so much on number of beds or ventilators, but more importantly, on its number of trained personnel to oversee and treat patients effectively.
If Mercy’s staff — doctors, nurses, orderlies, maintenance workers, clerical workers, ambulance drivers — includes parents of preschool or school-age children, then 9-R’s decision to switch to remote learning, conducted at home with parent supervision, is almost certain to pull staff out of the hospital to manage at-home learning.
A difficult decision, to be sure. How do you make sure your public school staff is protected — while also making sure your hospital is fully staffed? An impossible dilemma, perhaps.
And it applies also to workers outside the medical profession, who work in other essential jobs. (Including teaching, of course.)
For the time being, Archuleta School District is still offering in-person instruction in all three of its school buildings, and so is Pagosa Peak Open School, the district’s only authorized charter school. I don’t have any data to indicate how many of the 200 plus staff that Pagosa Springs Medical Center have children in our public schools. I assume at least a few of the staff are parents of school-age children, or preschool children.
We don’t quite know how to run this thing, yet.