Teachers face tough decisions as Omicron sends school attendance rates plummet

Empty chair at an empty table

Since classes returned earlier this month, schools in the United States have seen unusually low attendance rates due to the Omicron variant that infects or causes large numbers of students, staff, and parents. scared brother, The Wall Street Journal report Wednesday.

Follow Magazine, New York City’s school attendance rate has dropped from more than 91 percent before the pandemic to less than 70 percent since classes returned in early 2022. Boston Public Schools has also seen a decline. same school. In Chicago, the dropout rate was around 15 percent before winter break, but about a third of students stayed home on the first day of the new semester.

This increase in absenteeism comes after most public schools scaled back to distance instruction, leaving some students unable to come to class with some options to keep up with their classmates. Teachers are being put in the uncomfortable position of deciding whether to slow down the pace of instruction in the classroom or cause children to be absent at risk of falling far behind their peers.

Heather Hill, a professor at Harvard’s School of Graduate Education, told Magazine that some teachers are setting up cameras in their classrooms or letting students present to stream videos to their classmates at home. Others are arranging after-school calls with students who are absent.

Megan Struder, a public high school teacher in Stafford County, Virginia, says Week that “workload for teachers has doubled” since the start of the pandemic, and that Omicron is even “more disruptive” than previous variants.

Based on data provided by New York Times, Omicron continued to generate a record number of new cases but without a corresponding increase in the number of deaths.

The 7-day average of new cases per day is now more than 760,000, while the daily number of deaths is just over 1,700. Exactly 4 months ago, 7 days on average there were 150,000 fewer new cases per day causing the same number of deaths.