If you’re a student in suburban Needham who is sick or quarantining, you can still attend classes — remotely through livestreaming. The process is straightforward: the student asks the teacher and gets online from home.
For Boston Public School students who need to isolate or quarantine, there is no similar procedure. The district has what it calls a “Home & Hospital Process” that only applies to students sick for two weeks or longer. Those students and their families must embark on a bureaucratic and little-known six-stage process. It requires a physician to fill out a form, a parent to fill out a form and a nurse to approve those forms and submit them to the district’s team for a student to get approval to livestream classes.
This may explain why just 39 of nearly 50,000 Boston public school students are enrolled in livestreaming even as COVID-19 cases surge. And that underscores the persistent inequities in education depending on where a child in Massachusetts attends school in the pandemic.
“As much as the pandemic has exacerbated these inequalities, it's also bringing to light very longstanding inequalities,” said MIT professor Justin Reich, director of its Teaching Systems Lab. “Long before March of 2020, kids in Needham had more opportunities to learn effectively with technology than kids in Boston did. It's much more visible now. But it was ... no less shameful in March of 2019 than it is in January of 2022.”
Massachusetts’ department of elementary and secondary education has maintained in the 2021-22 academic year that schools are not allowed to teach remotely, even in the midst of the latest COVID-19 surge, with education officials and Gov. Charlie Baker citing the student mental health crisis and the benefits of in-person learning last week. Not everyone agrees, with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu recently suggesting it’s too rigid, and a student petition circulating for remote learning with more than 3,500 signatures.
But there is an opening in the state education department's rule that districts appear to interpret differently. It says that, if schools have the ability, they can allow sick or quarantining students to join their regularly scheduled day remotely by livestreaming . Students who participate in at least half of the school day remotely under those circumstances will not be considered absent. Some districts, though, may not know the option exists for students, or may not have the technological resources to pull it off.
The way the policy looks on the ground is very different when you compare public schools like Boston and Needham, one serving a high proportion of students of color, often from challenging economic circumstances or with special needs; the other mostly white, middle to upper-middle class and in homes where internet is a given.
Aaron Sicotte, the principal at Needham High School, said he’s routinely on phone calls with a group of principals in various districts who are trying to get students these services as a way to help them keep up academically during the pandemic. About a quarter of Needham High School’s 1,700 students were absent last week.
“Supporting larger number of kids at home is just the most recent of the things that we’ve been trying to figure out,” he said. “I think we’ve got a pretty good plan for Needham High School in place. And I think most of the other high schools that I’m in communication with feel the same, even though their plan may look a little different than ours. Each of them are meeting the needs of the community itself that we each serve.”
Students can access a livestreamed class, which he said is not as interactive as last year’s fully synchronous format, when teachers were set up to field questions from both in-person and remote students. But he said it’s helpful, and many absent students are participating.
In Boston Public Schools, spokesman Jonathan Palumbo said the district sent notices to families about a livestreaming option last summer. It’s an option only for sick students who will be out two weeks or more, he said, and explicitly excludes students who are isolating or quarantining due to COVID-19.
The district has also worked with schools and families to ensure those students who are out because they are quarantining or isolating due to COVID-19 exposure have access to lesson plans during the time they missed.
Reich said it’s not fair to hold Boston to the same standard as districts like Needham. Boston has more than 20 high schools to manage, and Needham just one. Remote learning occurred last year in Boston Public Schools, when the state education department permitted schools and classes to operate fully remotely, and some students were given computers and temporary internet. But Reich said computers break, networks fail and hotspots may no longer be available.
Last spring, the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT surveyed teachers and K-12 students, largely in the Boston area, to ask about their views on the first year of learning under COVID conditions, and what they needed for the 21/22 school and year beyond. One theme among the hundreds of students and teachers interviewed was to fix longstanding inequities between school systems, inequities that often feel like indignities to students. Some students wanted bigger and more modern science classrooms or a lesser police presence in school buildings. Others cited better bathrooms, higher-quality school lunches or relaxed requirements around dress codes, the report said.
These are fixable problems, Reich said.
“It’s about creating a more equitable world where, you know, every kid in Boston has high-speed internet in their house, and has technology access, and has access to high-quality medical care and testing and things like that,” he said. “If there are great choices available to students in Needham, there should be the same set of great choices available to students in Boston. The problem is schools alone can’t make all of the great choices available.”
