Long Covid is Coming For Education and We're Not Ready

As we enter year three of the global pandemic and the world runs back to "normal" in total denial of the facts, sometimes it's easy to forget that it has been such a short period of time. Grief and loss has warped all sense of time but the public is still learning about Covid and its long-term effects.

Research shows that about 43% of people have long Covid.

Symtoms include cognitive issues, fatigue, "chronic immune dysfunction." In addition to all of the death and loss Covid is a mass disabling event and it's very clear by now that not only are our institutions not prepared to deal with this but they don't actually want to.

Educators, both K-12 and higher ed, will be dealing with generations of students that are affected by this. Many educators commented at the beginning of the pandemic that education, like many other systems, had a chance to rebuild in a way that served their students, did better, and just...chose not to. Schools and administrations are still focusing on standardized testing, seat time, and learning loss instead of the mental and physical health of their students and employees. Education as a field and institution is totally and completely unprepared for generations of children, students, affected by Covid.

Let's start with the fact that "1 in 500 children in the United States has experienced Covid-19-associated orphanhood or death."

• The APA recommends that schools have "one school psychologist for every 500 to 700 students."
• Yet out of 48,479,590 public school students only 41,030 are in schools with "at least one full or part time psychologist." 
• 114,580 have a full time counselor and counselors have 360 students in their case load.

So schools do not currently have the capability to support students dealing with grief, loss, and mental health issues. Educators have been advocating for years for all schools to have social workers, psychologists, and more counselors. For the most part this has not resulted in any change or improvements.

People with long Covid are "suffering systemic physical problems."

• Let's start with the obvious- physical education classes. The approach to health and PE is antiquated and damaging. These programs rarely focus on helping students make good, long term health choices, finding exercise they like and can maintain and make good health choices. Too often they are fat phobic and set up environments for bullying and self esteem and body image issues. They have no long excluded large numbers of students for a variety of reasons. 
• So what happens when health and PE which is generally a required class or two in high school and has some sort of presence in K-8, has to be totally overhauled to refocus on better habits and accommodate students whose physical capabilities restrict or limit what they can and cannot do.
• Some of these problems include "microscopic blood clots." So how will teachers need to rethink seating arrangments in classrooms and group spaces to allow for students with physical problems and those that need to sit, move, adjust to be physically comfortable? It certainly means a total rethink of school furniture which continues to all seem trying to win awards for the most uncomfortable, unaccommodating possible.
• Students may have a hard time catching their breath. So they may move slower. So transitions between classes, how we build and design schools needs to be reconsidered. A lot of schools are not built with accommodation as the default. They may have elevators but often require a special key to use. Most schools depend on several levels of stairs as the default. So what if we have to rebuild or redesign for a different default? If  athletic fields and space between buildings has to have sidewalks, railings. Some schools are spread out, huge campuses. Will these need to be redesigned to instead have smaller footprints, taller, elevators as default and not stairs?

"Low oxygen levels may contribute to long Covid's most common symptom, severe fatique."

• So how long can we expect students to sit in a class? Classes? Some schools have year long 6-8 periods a day. Some schools have 4 90 minute block classes organized by semester. How do schools need to rethink this? Are shorter classes better? Do we need to not schedule students for more than say 3 academic classes a semester? Do we need to start having study halls or academic supports as defaults? Not only to help support tehcnology needs and access and tutoring but to give students time to work. Many schools used money available to move to online platforms, use Chromebooks, some were able to make hotspots available. But 24% of adults who make under $30,000 a year don't own a smartphone. 43% don't have broadband. 41% don't have a computer at home. Some states are making moves to increase broadband access but it's a slow process.
• While we talk about access to technology we also have to ask how fatigue, the ability to focus, will affect how long students CAN sit in front of a computer to work. While many schools are back face to face and students aren't spending 6-7 hours a day online staring at a screen, many are still spending a lot of time working online. Are they being assessed on what they know or are they being assessed at how well they can sit in front of a screen and comprehend the lessons?
• How does lower oxygen levels affect students cognitive ability? How they process and understand the content, instructions, skills learned in class?

 "Even people with mild cases of Covid can experience sustained cognitive impairments, including reduced attention, memory and word finding."

• Many aspects of learning still prioritize memorizing information rather than knowing where to find it and applying it. This will have to change. This means that not only will teachers and professors have to change HOW they teach but what they teach. It also means that the standardized teaching that so many schools prioritize and are required to participate in in order to receive federal funding has to go.
• Instead students should be taught where to find information, not have to rely on remembering it, and classes should focus on how to apply this information.

Long Covid as well as the after effects and consequences of Covid will affect every aspect of education. There are three main areas that should be prioritized.

• First, the design of schools needs to change. Their air filtration systems should have been updated when all of this first started. Windows that never open need to be replaced with windows that can. Monitors need to become standard in all rooms to be transparent about air quality. Buildings need to be redesigned for accessibility. Given the falling down nature of most schools, the limited money (usually a small percentage of lottery earnings) dedicated to improving or even keeping up schools, this is one of the biggest issues. A big reason schools have not upgraded and instead chose hygiene theatre and plexiglass is because all of this will cost a lot. And there is no money.
• Classroom design and layout as well as building design needs to change. Classrooms should be larger to accommodate mobility aids. They should allow for wider walking aisles. They need to not have 30-40 desks crammed in them. We need to change the furniture and the layout. Conference style tables, comfortable, big, rolling, chairs.
• Second, how teachers teach needs to be completely changed. Teachers need to be trained in Social Emotional Learning and Trauma Pedagogy. Teachers need to be taught new ways to teach that acknowledges and centers the above issues. Assessment as we know it and has been implemented for decades needs to go. It is not equitable to have high stakes testing about benchmarks, instead assessment needs to focus on growth and application. A balance needs to be struck between online and virtual options for accessibility, more virtual school options, more choices for students who do better OUT of racist, ableist, violent schools. Teachers need to balance in their teaching all the wonderful things computers and apps and internet can do against what students can do at once, can focus on, can absorb.
• Third, schools will have to get rid of the punitive policies and cultures that they have clung to. Attendance policies need to go away forever. Online and remedial options, chances to catch up, need to be normalized. All schools should have dedicated teachers for online and dedicated ones to help students catch up. Policies that punish students for standing, listening to music, wear hats or hoodies, or otherwise don't conform, need to go. Students need to be allowed and encouraged to use the coping mechnaisms they have, to center their own comfort. Everyone should be encouraged to prioritize their health and not come to school when sick or depressed. Schools should model getting help.
• Finally, schools need to build in support networks and normalize getting help. This means more school psychologists, social workers. It means more community contacts to be able to anticipate and address larger issues. Guidance counselors need to have smaller case loads, and teachers need to have smaller classes. Programs that prioritize and normalize mental and physical health should be a norm and schools should become centers for their communities. Some schools did some of this during the pandemic, acting as food pantries, vaccine clinics, providing resources. All schools should become community schools.

As a lot of teachers know when you accommodate your classroom, your policies, your environment, everyone does better, not just the students who "need" the accommodations. These changes would radically change what education looks like. They would be better for students, their families, the employees.

But as we enter the third year of this pandemic I haven't seen any widespread acknowledgement of what education needs to do in order to face the issues currently facing the field, and which will only grow exponentially as time goes on. Over and over again education plays catch up if it pays attention at all. Educaiton has been purposely underfunded and ignored for decades so rather than having some improvements to make to reflect these current issues schools are facing the overwhleming prospect of trying to catch their schools up from the last few decades AND make these current improvements. Schools are not ready. There is no support for it. There is no money for it.

And all of the lack, the lack of support, the lack of care, the lack of acknowledgement, just adds more and more weight to students and employees. There is more to do, more to accommodate on your own, and less and less help. Everyone is "back to normal" and just ignoring not only the current situation we're all still in but the consequences of the everything everyone has dealt with the last few years, and this is all on top of even more damage that students and communities have been dealing with under Trump and the GOP, which was on top of the Tea Party demonizing, hating, and despising education.

So what happens to our schools when conservative bigots drive good educators out of their field under threat of being themselves, teaching truth, or refusing to lie to students? What happens when those same people drive money to "school choice," resulting in the biggest boom of charter schools since white parents refused to send their children to desegregated schools and a large number of private Christian schools appeared. Many schools, many communities have become hostile work environments for many teachers. "55% of educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than planned." But leaving is a privilege and not everyone can. So what kind of learning environment is that?

What is the effect on students who are abandoned, left behind, ignored? We are talking about decades and decades of effects. A student who entered elementary school in 2020 is ending second grade only knowing the pandemic. If they have long Covid their learning and education will always be affected by this. For students who are in middle or high school or college and have long Covid may have a harder time coping because it will be very clear to them that there are deficits, changes, and these can be harder. They might suffer mental issues, anxiety, depression, because there is a pressure to perform to "normal" levels and they just can't but the entire world tells them they should and there's no help, no acknowledgement.

What about educators who are fried? Exhausted? And this will only get worse as there is no relief in sight, no help is coming. As the world at large moves on at the same time it drops all mitigation factors, educators are all still dealing with the same things, the same issues, the same problems. Trauma is cumulative. Educators have had to personally take on expenses, the mental and physical costs, as well as try to support students, make all the accommodations they can. Do more with less, which has long been a mantra for education has taken on apocalyptic meanings. 

In a world where people can't wear masks to keep from killing people I don't feel very hopeful that the very institutions that have epicly failed these last few years will suddenly rally and do what is right. I am terrified of what this means for students, educators, communities. What the impacts will be on our entire society. I wish I could believe that there was a plan, that these conversations were not just occurring but were supported, funded, acted on. But I don't. And I am tired, and scared, and hopeless. And I am so worried for all of my friends and students who are all trying the best they can against just ridiculous odds.

It's time to stop and think about the brave new world we're continuing to go along with

We're halfway through the fifth semester of the Covid pandemic. Many schools either have or are getting ready to move back to operating like the Before Times. Many schools that have spent the last couple of years only teaching online went back face to face in some capacity this semester. Many schools are dropping social distancing, capacity limits, mask mandates. It certainly seems like Fall 2022 will look like any semester from the Before Times on campuses across the country.

I don't think we collectively will, but I think now is the time for us all as educators, staff, employees in higher ed to use the next several months to stop and think about what we're doing.

When the pandmic hit college classrooms, blowing up our classroom instructions, our students' lives, and throwing everyone into chaos and fear, we collectively made a lot of snap decisions that we've continued and we really have not stopped to think about them.

We collectively all moved to Zoom. Is Zoom an ethical company? What are their terms of service? Most of us are not using Zoom under personal accounts we're using them under university umbrella accounts. What data is collected about these meetings? How many times we use it? Are the chats stored? Are people's IP addresses? We moved to Zoom because Teams and Skype seemed not up to the task at the beginning, but why have we continued to use it? I know some people have moved to Teams, but what are these decisions, the assumption that everyone has to participate, based on?

We normalized recording Zoom lectures and meetings skipping over the act of consent. How many recorded meetings have you been a part of where everyone in the meeting was asked for consent to recording? How many lectures or class meetings did faculty ask their students for the consent to record?

In the last few years there's been a lot made of whether or not students turn on cameras in Zoom sessions. Educators have said it's incredibly hard to teach to a field of black boxes. They've also said that requiring students to turn on their cameras, to let us into their personal spaces is a violation. There are ethical issues in seeing students in their pajamas, or on their beds, or in their apartments. Have their family members consented to appearing on camera in the background? Did we consider the consent, the invasion of privacy of the students? Or did we gloss over these issues because we were constantly reacting?

Three years in I don't see any way to make an argument that we're all just still reacting. There has been time, there IS time to pause, to stop, to take a look around at what the situation is now and have honest conversations about what we're doing, why, and whether or not we should continue to do these things.

In fact, each semester we should have been having re-norming conversations with our departments, administration, and students. Part of our planning for return should have been looking at where we are:

For the rest of this semester we've pivoted to Blackboard. I've built all our readings, assignments, there and shifted what would be our class discussions to discussion boards. I know everyone is dealing with a lot and I've tried to think of the best way to proceed. If you need anything, please don't hesitate to let me know. Please take care of yourself.

This summer our class is online only. It is asynchronous which means we will not all be on at the same time. The class is all built. I recommend you use the syllabus to see what we're doing that week, then go into Blackboard for the content and work your way through the materials. However, I understand that we're still dealing with a lot, so once a week I will hold a Zoom workshop, a Q&A for anything you need, mini-lessons on how to do that week's work. I encourage you to attend if you can. If not I'll upload the recordings to the class.

This semester we are teaching hybrid. In this class that means that I will be splitting the class in half where half will attend on X day and half on Y. This is a face to face class, it is not on Zoom. We will have a couple of guest speakers this semester and on those class days we will not meet in person we'll all meet on Zoom because in person and on Zoom has difficulties. I offer office hours both in person and on Zoom, and I'm always available through email.

This semester we're returning to in person learning. However, we recognize that we're returning when Omicron is still very much a threat. So while class is scheduled for face to face if you're unable to attend in person due to quarantine or illness then I will log into Zoom in the classroom every day and you can join us. These sessions will not be recorded. I will also scan and upload my class notes for you. As always if you miss class you should be sure to check the syllabus and ask for help if you need it.

I've always been a big advocate for being honest with students about pedagogical decisions. This is what we're doing and this is WHY we do it. When I survey them and they tell me they're overwhelmed I cut work, revise assignments, make changes, and tell that what changes I made and why.

Yet we have not been communicating with our students about all the assumptions we've made the last few years.

We assumed everyone was fine with Zoom. 

We assumed everyone had computers and Internet access despite campuses flailing to provide laptops, hot spots, and the number of students sitting in their cars in McDonald's parking lots for wi-fi.

We assumed students were fine with having their time logged into Blackboard tracked and gathered, ignoring that this data does not actually tell you how much their working in the course. Some students can log in and work for hours. Others go to the library for wi-fi, download a bunch of work, then have to go to work, and complete school work offline later and the next time they log into download they upload work.

We assumed students would complete our work on computers, at desks, in spaces that were conducive to learning. Not typing on their phones trying to fit in getting reading and work done during their fifteen minute break at work.

We told students they had to agree to surveillance software, to being treated like they were automatically criminals, forcing them to spin their laptop around to show us a 360 view of their space before taking a test. We ignored the fact that there were a hundred good reasons why surveillance software would log not making eye contact from neuro-diverse students. Or why a student might need to hit pause, go deal with a toddler or parent, or other family member, and come back to the test.

I think we also have to have honest conversations with our students. One thing many people have pointed out the last few years is how the line between personal, work, and school has blurred to the point to almost be non-existent. We taught from our couches, we learned from our bedrooms, we worked outside of "normal" hours in an attempt to get it all done. In an attempt to provide support, show we care, we've asked about our students, checked in, and probably heard from horrific, traumatic, heartbreaking and personal stories from them than we ever thought we would. We've probably shared with them to be sympathetic and empathetic. Recognizing the fact that in many ways we were all adrift together, doing our best to just make it through. All of us have coped in different ways. Students and faculty have done amazing things to get through all of this. Faculty have designed and redesigned classes on a dime. Spent ten times as much time building classes in order to do everything they could to help and support their students. Students have used games, Slack, Discord, social media, to support each other, share resources, be there for one another.

One thing we have to stop and think about is what of all this we will move forward with and what we won't. Where will we redraw borders and boundaries? How do we disentangle the personal and professional and neither go back because there is no going back, but also don't continue ahead like nothing happened.

As has been true throughout the pandemic we have a chance to rebuilt education in a way that is equitable and accessible and better serves our students and communities. For the most part we've failed to do this the past three years. We've continued with a focus on "seat time" and "content coverage" and worried about "learning loss" and standardized test scores when we should have been caring about so many people dead we can't personally comprehend the number. Of 30% of survivors of Covid with long-term if not lifelong disabilities, many of which are neurological and will impact our students and classrooms for decades. We should have faced the hard fact that many of the people we work with and socialized with were unwilling to take simple steps to not kill people. We should be asking how we help the 1 in 500 children who have been orphaned because of Covid.

I worry that we again and again and again watch the chances to make real, important, institutional change sail by and do nothing.

We've been pinballs for three years rocketing from one thing to another, reacting, not stopping moving, moving, moving. And when you're so focused on just surviving, just getting through the day, dealing with the million horrible things happening in the world every day, ease of use, convenience, and lack of decision making can make us NOT think about whether or not what we're doing is ethical, moral, in the best interest of our students.

I think now is the time to stop what we're doing and have these conversations. We need to have them with other faculty, our students, administration. 

We have to pay attention to the accessibility that online classes, Zoom for guest speakers, conferences, provides to a large percentage of students and faculty who have been locked out of a lot of activities because of the lack of accessibility.

We have to recognize that attendance policies are ableist and harm students and we need to get rid of them.

We need to recognize that online teaching and learning is not just dumping recorded lectures or PDFs online. We need to recognize that not all teachers should or want to be teaching online. We need to recognize the need for good, engaging online classes. We should be investing more in our distance learning and IT infrastructure. We should offer professional development to teachers who want to learn how to do this better.

We need to realize that when we adopt software we need to make informed decisions. There should be school committees made up of faculty, students, technology experts that look at these options, discuss the ethics of the company, draft language about what data it gathers, and share this with students. We need to empower students to opt out of programs and software for ethical reasons.

We need to admit that surveillance software cannot be used ethically. It is racist, it is ableist, it sets up an "us/them" relationship where faculty members ALWAYS assume their students are liars and cheats. Schools need to stop, immediately, all use of it. They should also stop using any form of plagiarism software for the same reasons. Instead take those tens of thousands of dollars those contracts cost and instead invest in professional development that helps faculty redesign assignments, informs them about cultural differences with plagiarism, and puts it in the larger context of Internet information, NFTs, citations, memes, and who owns information.

One casualty of the last few years has been trust. We have broken trust in governments, in public health, in institutions. We have broken trust with our students in a thousand ways large and small. I think campuses stopping, having these conversations, including students in the process, being transparent about what we're doing and why, is just one step in trying to rebuild and restore this trust.

I don't know what the world looks like if we don't.

I don't know what the future looks like if we have a large percentage of the population that doesn't trust in anything. I don't know what day to day life looks like if the interactions are all adversarial, if educators see their students as enemies and vice versa. I don't know how students learn, how they live, if they are traumatized daily by surveillance and distrust.

I think there is a reckoning coming in education. I think that we have not collectively even begun to acknowledge