Arizona School Reopening Debate Continues

ARIZONA — As Arizona schools gear up to welcome students virtually in the coming weeks, many teachers and parents across the country remain divided on whether reopening is safe. Arizona, deemed a coronavirus hot spot, is not immune to the debate.

Arizona’s numbers of new coronavirus cases and deaths seem to be slowly dwindling, and ventilator use is down from its peak in early July. The Arizona Department of Health Services reported 2,525 new cases and 172 known deaths Thursday, and Gov. Doug Ducey in a news conference encouraged Arizonans to “stay the course” with mask-wearing and social distancing to further eradicate community spread.

Ducey also announced Thursday that metrics for schools to use in safely reopening will be released Aug. 7. The governor had previously said that each school district in the state must open at least one location for in-person learning by Aug. 17 to accommodate kids with nowhere else to go.

But for some teachers, it’s still too soon.

The Arizona Education Association, which represents over 2,000 school employees in the state, polled educators in June. They found that 90 percent are concerned about health repercussions for teachers and students in the classroom, while 80 percent said students should stay home until public health experts deem it safe to return.

“Schools must not become places that increase that spread or endanger the lives of students, staff, or of our surrounding community,” the AEA said in a statement earlier this month. “Until a campus, a worksite, or a classroom can assure educators, students, and parents that they will be safe, it is too great a risk for anyone to enter a school facility.”

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Others argue that parents and students should have the choice to send their kids to school in person, with many attending a rally Tuesday at the Arizona State Capitol in support of reopening.

Each school district has been tasked with developing its own plans for in-person learning, but not all of these plans were put into place without controversy.

The Arizona Republic reported one teacher was fined $2,000 by the Dysart Unified School District in El Mirage after resigning ahead of the school year because he would be required to teach his virtual classes from the school. There was also the story of Kimberly Chavez Lopez Byrd, an Arizona teacher who died after contracting COVID-19 while teaching summer school in a classroom with two other educators, despite taking all the necessary precautions.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States is set to surpass 4.5 million, with more than 152,000 deaths so far, according to recent data from Johns Hopkins University.

Parents and teachers will likely be keeping an eye on the data as they begin to log back in for school in the coming weeks.