Few official responses to this pandemic have been smooth, but students heading back to class in the new year deserved better than the exceptionally bumpy ride provided by the state Department of Education.
Last week, as children returned for in-person learning in the midst of skyrocketing COVID-19 cases, the DOE sent memos to school- complex officials and principals, outlining its protocols. The department also announced publicly it was conforming to the latest federal guidance on isolation for those testing positive.
However, the students and families that rely on public schools have the right to expect more timely guidance than they received. They need better support at the statewide level and from individual campuses for their health protection.
There really was no good excuse for what has to be seen as a failure of readiness. The crushing surge in infections from the omicron variant of the virus was already reported from around the globe, with cases popping up in Hawaii, since the waning weeks of the fall semester.
The need to prepare should have been anticipated, and yet there was no public messaging over the holidays of plans before class instruction was set to resume in the midst of a record surge.
Increased staff absences, due in large part to COVID-19 infections, left many classes without teachers. The current pool of 3,800 substitute teachers could not compensate. Schools relied on teachers or administrators doubling up, or sending students to study halls in cafeterias or gyms.
Even at the top level there was little evidence of forward-thinking leadership. Gov. David Ige said he has been in “conversation” with the DOE administration about personal protective equipment for students and staff.
That’s not enough, if the rank-and-file of the school system, and parents worried about sending their children back to campus, are left largely in the dark.
Further, the governor admitted on Monday, speaking on the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s Spotlight Hawaii webcast, that the state’s inventory for schools does not include supplies of quality masks in children’s sizes.
Really?
Ige needed to take the reins of this issue from the start, making sure contingency plans were sufficient and leading the messaging about provisions for school safety.
At the department level as recently as last week, Interim Superintendent Keith Hayashi had information that at best was spotty. The DOE’s layered approach to safeguarding campus environments, he said, would enable in-person education to continue largely in the same way.
That’s what made it so appalling when later in the week he had an admission: Dozens of schools had failed, some for months, to report their COVID-19 infection cases as required.
The fact that infection rates were incompletely reported did not surprise many teachers. They also have been asserting that the protective protocols DOE officials have described — various combinations of components from ventilation improvements to keeping students in cohorts and maintaining distancing — did not match what they were seeing on the ground.
Hayashi, speaking at a legislative briefing on Thursday, apologized for the reporting lapse by 42 public schools that, as of Tuesday last week, had not posted their case counts to the DOE’s dashboard since before winter break.
This dashboard had been the means of informing families and educators about the safety of the schools, as Osa Tui, president of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, rightly pointed out.
The missing data from the dashboard is being corrected, Hayashi said — but damage to the DOE’s credibility had already been done.
Of course, the problems of coping with omicron go all the way up to the Biden administration, which should have ramped up production of rapid antigen tests long ago. The White House announced Wednesday that a dedicated stream of 5 million rapid tests and 5 million lab-based PCR tests will be made available to schools monthly, starting this month.
These are tests that Hawaii schools must secure if its current plans for testing students are to succeed. The DOE goal — and it’s the right one — is to keep students in school as much as possible. When they are exposed to someone with a positive test result, Hayashi said, they will be tested and sent home only if they come up with a positive result.
If the projections about omicron bear out, however, the test supply, and promised federal shipments of higher-quality masks, may not come in time to help with the current surge. Even so, having the supplies on hand is crucial: There still could be a long pandemic road ahead.
For the long term, the DOE has a boatload of homework to do: better anticipating future needs, building more capacity in its substitute teaching capacity, enabling more nimble use of distance learning, when that becomes necessary.
We’d hate to see the grade teachers would give the department, though, for this latest exam.
