At least a quarter of American students are believed to have not spent a single day in school in over a year because of the pandemic. Others have experienced a hybrid system of in-person and remote learning. This week on 60 Minutes, correspondent John Dickerson visits one of the first school districts in the country to help researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study how coronavirus is transmitted within schools. His report will be broadcast Sunday, March 21, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
Marietta City Schools have been offering in-person learning four days a week at all grade levels since November. The school system kept operating through the highest period of infection in its community. In December and January, CDC researchers conducted extensive tests and interviews in Marietta to identify cases of school-based transmission of the coronavirus and try to understand how it had spread.
“When we first started the project with the CDC, I was convinced that we were going to have more transmission in middle and high school classrooms than we had in elementary,” Marietta Superintendent Grant Rivera tells John Dickerson. “What surprised me as we worked through this is that it was actually the exact opposite, that we were seeing more potential transmission in an elementary classroom than we were in a middle and high school classroom.”
The difference may be partly explained by the fact that a much higher percentage of students in the high school have been choosing to attend school virtually, making it easier for the students who attend in-person to socially distance. But Rivera believes that the dynamic within an elementary school classroom plays a role as well. “You’ve got a child that walks in, that stays in that classroom seven hours, eight hours. Those kids are mixing and milling. They may go to the rug, they may go to small group.”
Rivera says he’s worked with teachers to “re-engineer” their classrooms by limiting small group learning and close interactions. He’s also tried to reduce in-person interactions among educators because approximately half of the school-based COVID cases identified in Marietta elementary schools seemed to begin with “educator-to-educator transmission” and then spread to students, according to the CDC study.
Dickerson’s report also includes the first interview with a teacher from Swainsboro, Georgia who spent nearly 40 days on a ventilator and almost died from complications of COVID-19. For 15 years, Shonray Brooks has taught in the Emanuel County school district, which does not require masks be worn in class. After months of physical therapy, Brooks still has a lot of health problems. She doesn’t know whether she’ll ever be able to teach again.
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