Our AY 2022-23 pandemic plan

This is a brief overview of the layers of protection that we are applying at Abrome for the 2022-23 academic year. Abrome has been able to remain COVID free for the past three years of pandemic schooling.

The success we have had in protecting each other and local communities from the spread of COVID is something we are very proud of. We were only able to do that thanks to a collective commitment to community care, transparency, and candid and honest communication.

Community care means centering the needs of those who would be most impacted by our decisions and actions, and leveraging our privilege to support them. We must acknowledge three realities about the COVID pandemic (and likely Mpox, too):

1. COVID continues to fall heaviest on BIPOC communities, the immunocompromised, those without access to quality healthcare, essential workers, the unvaccinated, etc. All of our pandemic decisions must center those most impacted. Nothing we do impacts only those at Abrome.

2. All Facilitators and Learners go home to families, friends, and into other communities each day. If we were to spread COVID at Abrome, we’d spread it elsewhere, too.

3. There is no such thing as a harmless single case of COVID. Including cases that are “mild.” Each case has the potential to lead to long-term chronic health problems and disrupt quality of life, seed a superspreader event, and host a mutation that can become a new variant.

To limit the likelihood of infection and spread, we will use a multilayered approach to not bringing COVID into our education community, and not spreading COVID if it does find its way into the community. Please see our pandemic plan for greater detail.

Masking: Everyone will wear KF94s, KN95s, or N95s (or higher filtration masks or respirators) whenever we are indoors, and any time we are close to one another outdoors above the lowest risk level. All snacks and meals must be eaten outdoors.

Physical distancing: As cases rise we will reduce reduce density, cohort, and meet outdoors. Quarantine and isolation lasts 7 and 10 days, respectively, including a test out requirement. Abromies will receive remote support, and Facilitators receive paid sick time off.

Air quality: We will aggressively ventilate the space and monitor ventilation with CO2 monitors (800ppm max). Each room is also equipped with at least one HEPA purifier or Corsi-Rosenthal box, producing in excess of 12 air changes per hour (ACH) in filtration based on air volume.

Testing: Each morning every Learner and Facilitator completes a quick screening questionnaire before, each family submits a pooled household sample for LAMP surveillance testing, and we follow up with diagnostic testing based on results or stated concerns of exposure.

Vaccines: This year we also have a vaccination mandate except in very rare cases of medical necessity. Our definition of fully vaccinated includes being up-to-date on boosters.

Risk levels: We will use our updated COVID risk level system to determine when, where, and how we will gather. The five risk levels have cutoffs based on the average new cases per 100,000 and the test positivity rate, locally.

Gathering guidelines: Risk determines where we gather, how big our cells can be, whether we must mask (always indoors), when we will conduct LAMP testing (whenever in-person), and how close we can be from each other to include when eating (always outdoors).

Some say that we need kids back in schools even without sufficient measures to protect them from COVID infection because of learning loss, socialization, or other racist and classist assumptions. We believe such claims are not only false, they are ethically and morally repugnant.

Here is the Abrome pandemic plan for the coming academic year. Cannot wait to see you all on September 6th.

Covid: three pandemic years in—looking back

Most schools in central Texas reopen this week, and the overwhelming majority of them will have no meaningful COVID protections in place, much less a multilayered approach that would drastically reduce the risk of spread of COVID within their school communities. Needless to say, they will have no meaningful Monkeypox protections in place, either. 

At Abrome, we still have three weeks until the first day of our 2022-2023 academic year, and have yet to put out our finalized pandemic plan for the coming year. We expect to do so in the next ten days, and expect it to be similar to our plan for the past year. Our last academic year wrapped up only five and a half weeks ago, on Friday, July 9th, and we finished our third pandacademic year without a single known case of COVID in the space. The following day I posted a twitter thread that briefly touched upon the multilayered approach we took to stop the spread of the disease. In the hopes of encouraging school leaders, teachers, staff, parents, and students who believe there is nothing they can do to protect each other from COVID in the current political and social environment, I am including the full text of that thread, and where appropriate I expound on what we did and how these practices can be implemented in their schools. I will also address some of the criticisms that many people brought forth. Disclaimer: snark.

Our 2021-22 academic year just ended yesterday.

We just finished our 3rd year without a single case of COVID-19 in the space. That means not a single person was exposed “at school.” Doubly impressive given the transmissibility of the current variants.

How did we do it?

— Abrome (@AbromeEd) July 9, 2022

Our 2021-22 academic year just ended yesterday. 

We just finished our 3rd year without a single case of COVID-19 in the space. That means not a single person was exposed “at school.” Doubly impressive given the transmissibility of the current variants.

How did we do it?

First, we prioritized community care over white, upper middle class, reactionary insecurity. We recognized early on that COVID was falling heaviest on BIPOC communities, the immunocompromised, those without access to quality healthcare, etc. All our decisions centered them. 

[This really bothered a lot of folks. A quick check of those who complained showed they were disproportionately COVID deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers. Yes, I know that those terms are politically charged and may be viewed as pejoratives but in this case it is simply a statement of reality. Surprisingly a select group of COVID minimizers, advocates of only vaccinating people, advocates of only mandating masks, and blue check influencers (official accounts with large audiences) glossed over this and later claimed that our practices that centered BIPOC communities somehow harmed Black students because they were not stuck in school. Note: learning loss is not a thing. And even if it was, it would not be a sufficient excuse to risk exposing kids to COVID, or their parens, guardians, or caregivers.]

Second, we acknowledged that nothing we do impacts only those at Abrome. All Facilitators (“teachers”) and young people (“students”) go home to families, friends, and into other communities each day. If we were to spread COVID at Abrome, we’d spread it elsewhere, too. 

[Some OPEN SCHOOLS NOW people (who argue that we just have to get kids back in schools [as if they haven’t been back in schools] and who are overwhelmingly middle class and upper middle class white people) and COVID minimizers argued that kids were more likely to catch it at home than they were at school. True, because at home you are breathing in each other’s air over extended periods of time, without protection measures. And the parents are bringing the disease home most often from work (schools happen to be workplaces for teachers and staff) or other settings where people come together, usually indoors, usually without masking, and usually without other forms of protections—like schools. And it is a foolish argument against preventing spread at school because when a kid brings the disease home from school then everyone in their family becomes at risk of being infected. The disease does not magically not spread when a kid brings it home.]

Third, there is no such thing as a harmless single case of COVID that someone with “a healthy immune system” can overcome. Each case has the potential to seed a superspreader event. Each case has the potential to host a mutation that can become a new variant. 

So we focused on two things.

1) not bringing COVID into our education community.

2) not spreading COVID if it did find its way into the community. 

To not bring it in we started with going remote during periods of very high spread. This was easy in the spring of 2020 when all schools chose to do the same. It got much harder in 2021 & 2022 when society bought into the argument that kids and teachers should accept infection. 

[See screenshot of daily spread calculation instructions.]

We also had each family conduct a daily COVID screening. If someone showed up having not completed it we did it with them in-person before allowing them to enter the space / join the group. 

It worked. During every wave we had some students or staff get infected outside of Abrome, but because of our practices none brought it into the community (which would have then spread out beyond the community). 

[See screenshot of screening checklist. We will be updating the screening for the coming year.]

To not spread it if it snuck into the community we acknowledged that #COVIDisAirborne. We mandated masks whenever indoors. KF94, KN95, N95, or better. Zero indoor “mask breaks.” And folks had to go outdoors to eat.

Outdoors they had to wear masks when close to each other. 

And we went outdoors for the entirety of the 2020-2021 academic year! In the Texas heat! This year we had at least one cell of people outdoors pretty much each day except when we went remote during Delta and Omicron. During very high levels of spread, everyone went outdoors. 

[One OPEN SCHOOLS NOW and blue check influencer accused us of being remote most of the time, while wealthy schools “used their resources to keep kids safer in person.” Well, we are not a wealthy school, so we didn’t have those resources (assuming they meant money), and they conveniently glossed over the fact that we were not largely remote.]

We also filtered our indoor air. Each room was equipped with HEPA filtration systems or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, each with a CADR that would deliver at least 6 ACH per room based on room volume, and 8 ACH in bathrooms. That also required calculating the volume of each room. See, maybe you will use need to know that math in the future!

“Sure, but you can only do that because you’re a well-funded private school!!”

Wrong. We are not a rich private school. Our sliding scale tuition give us only 40% of the tuition per student that the local public schools receive. We just prioritize community care! 

[And that tweet was prescient as that same OPEN SCHOOLS NOW and blue check influencer attacked our plan because "MAKING ACTUAL SCHOOLS SAFER REQUIRES INVESTMENT” while completely ignoring that we did on the cheap what schools with an annual budgets that ran into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars refused to do anything to clean their air.] 

On top of filtering the air we ventilated the indoor space. We opened windows and created lots of cross flow. We used CO2 monitors as a proxy measure for ventilation. When the readings went above 650 we cranked the AC and opened the windows further, if it hit 800 we vacated. 

We implemented capacity limits indoors, for each room and for the total number who could be indoors at any given time.

We also broke our community up into smaller and smaller groups/cells as cases rose. And pushed them outdoors. It is safer outdoors. 

If someone would have inadvertently come into the space / group infected, the smaller cells limited the pool of people who could be exposed.

No one came in infected (as much luck as it was preventative policies) but even if they did the number they could infect was capped. 

[Some critics pointed out that we were lucky and that we could not attribute no one bringing COVID into Abrome or spreading it within the community to our practices. As if we did not acknowledge that luck most certainly played a part. But luck does often favor those who prepare.]

When the CDC catered to politicians and corporations and said that local spread should not be the driver of how we choose to meet, we ignored them. When the CDC said that we could drastically shorten quarantine and isolation periods, or not require testing out, we ignored them. 

[Sorry for also ignoring you, the OPEN SCHOOLS NOW blue check influencers who insist upon a one-size fits all solution that requires multi-billions of dollars of investment from the same government that is actively trying to convince us that we should just live with COVID.] 

Next year we will also have a vaccine mandate except in very rare cases of medical necessity (everyone in our community is vaccinated already). 

[This only got push back from anti-vaxxers. The vaccinate only crowd only took issue with everything else we wrote.]

The pandemic has really tested our community. Centering community care has put a big dent in our enrollment. But we understand our obligations toward our families, our community, and our society. 

And that was the thread.

The COVID minimizers, OPEN SCHOOLS NOW people, and blue check influencers also came out in force to attack us for being too small to take seriously.  Side note, the COVID minimizers, the vaccinate-only, the masking-only, and blue check influencers do seem to be causing much more harm than the COVID deniers these days. This was our response to them:

So the fact that we are a very small education community seems to really gall some people, convincing them to shout that our approach to Covid is irrelevant because of our size. Because if we don't have at least 100 enrolled there is nothing to learn from our efforts.

We are a Self-Directed Education community that rejects the practices and structures of schooling and instead focus on centering community care and honoring the autonomy of young people. We will never become a large school because we are not what most parents want. 👍

We consider ourselves to be a liberation project, acting prefiguratively to serve as a model for others to learn from and to replicate if it speaks to them. We strive to be an anti-oppressive space, and one of "a million experiments." Let those experiments propagate!

It is that mindset that allows us to center community care over white, upper middle class, reactionary insecurity. It is precisely because we are not a conventional school that we were able to focus on limiting the risk of exposure and spread through layered mitigations.

Some say that what we do cannot work for everyone because we go outdoors and then go remote when there is uncontrolled community spread. Or because we start at 10a. Or because we charge tuition.

True.

We cannot be all things to all people. We don't try to be.

We are one experiment. Ideally there would be many schools taking Covid seriously so that there were many more options for families. Even amongst district public schools. But we don't get public funding, so blaming us for not being free and available 24/7 is weird.

They angrily argue that what we do cannot be scaled up to all public school systems.

Yes. And no.

Yes, public schools, just like conventional private schools, serve power and the status quo. Even where communities overwhelmingly demand safer schools, most schools cannot even mandate masking. Our approach cannot be easily scaled up because it doesn't serve power.

But no, what we do can be scaled up to all schools because the measures are readily accessible to all who have the courage to push back against politicians and corporations, even if they have to do so in a renegade fashion. Investment is not the problem, priorities are.

The most closeminded position of all is that because of our small size that nothing we do is relevant, or somehow scaling up is not possible. What do people think schools are? Are they not large buildings, that are broken down into grades and classrooms?

Everything we do could be scaled. Mandated masking, monitoring air quality, ventilation, CR boxes or HEPA filters in classrooms, cohorting, daily screenings, quarantines & isolation that is not truncated and requires a test out, going outdoors, going remote.

Are they really arguing that layered mitigation measures are not feasible? Or are they saying that schools with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in annual budgets cannot afford it? Or are they just telling you to get vaccinated and look away?

We'll still be here.

Cover image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Your local school is failing your community by not being remote

It is 10:45 a.m. on Monday, January 24th, and the Abrome Facilitators and Learners just finished our first meeting of the week. Yes, unlike (presumably) all the schools in Central Texas, we are remote and have been since winter break. Well, sort of for all the schools in Central Texas. I’ll get back to that.

Our first day back from the break was scheduled for January 3rd, but recognizing that cases were quickly rising, we postponed our start date by a week to better assess the situation and to avoid bringing Learners back for one day before having to go remote. We told families that the lost week would be made up for by reducing spring break from two weeks to one. As expected, the numbers released by Austin Public Health on January 3rd pushed us into our risk level 5, meaning we would be remote for a while (assuming that institutions would not take necessary steps to help reduce the spread of Covid-19, locally).

Our remote looks quite different from what it looks like for most schools. Our remote is about holding space and maintaining connection with the Learners, knowing we will eventually get to come back together. During remote we host our daily morning meetings and afternoon roundups, and we host weekly Set-the-Week, Check-in, and Change-up meetings. We try to schedule 1:1 meetings with each Learner each week, with additional meetings for those who want it. And we schedule a variety of offerings that might be of interest to Learners, and support Learners who want to host their own offerings. We encourage Learners to attend Abrome meetings and offerings if it works for them, and to not attend if it does not. We have the flexibility to do so because we are a Self-Directed Education community, meaning we do not burden young people with a forced, narrow academic curriculum during pandemic times, just as we did not during pre-pandemic times. Nonetheless, remote is still an exhausting experience for our Facilitators, and a less than remarkable experience for most of the Abrome Learners. The Learners want to be together playing, creating, conversing, and learning together; and they want to be able to do it emergently, instead of according to an online schedule in a virtual space where attendance can be sporadic.

Conventional public and private schools cannot allow Learners to choose a path that works best for them during remote. Those schools rely on compulsory attendance, so the freedom to participate or not is anathema to them. But, because they are in the business of delivering academic curriculum to captive cohorts of students, they can quickly shift their product to remote delivery, as they had done in the spring of 2020. They could even do so relatively competently, assuming the schools are willing to support the teachers with the time and resources to do so. I am not saying going remote would be easy for them. Being remote is an inconvenience to the schools, and they would need to deal with irate parents demanding that their kids be in school, but the essential function of schooling remains the same. For the teachers, remote schooling is still exhausting. And for the students, remote schooling is certainly unremarkable.

But no matter how inconvenient or how poor the quality of remote schooling can be, no schools should be meeting in-person right now during this most infectious wave of the pandemic. Because schools are sites of transmission (including for superspreader events) every school had a social responsibility to their local community to go remote as soon as we entered into a period of uncontrolled community transmission of the disease, meaning every school should have been remote since the winter break. And every school that failed to do so (which I believe is every school, locally) now has a social responsibility to immediately go remote. Unfortunately, there are not many people in Central Texas, and virtually zero institutions, who agree that.

Many argue that because infections due to Omicron are “mild” relative to Delta infections that we should continue sending kids to school. Problem is, “mild” can still cause serious illness and death. In fact, daily deaths are higher now, nationally, than they were during the Delta wave, because of the extremely high number of infections. It also ignores that even “mild” illness can lead to long Covid and potentially very serious long-term medical conditions or disability that will shorten or greatly reduce the quality of life of millions of people.

Others say schools should be open because kids are unlikely to die from Covid-19. They’re also unlikely to die from a drunk driving accident, but few would advocate putting them in the car with a drunk driver. Further, like for adults, the consequences of infection are not a simple binary of live or die. Kids who get infected can still suffer greatly during the initial infection, they can suffer from long Covid, and an unknown number may develop serious health conditions that they will need to live with for years or decades into the future.

But even if they want to roll the dice on their children’s health, or other people’s children’s health, those who demand that schools stay open erase from the conversation all the adults who work in schools. Should teachers and staff sacrifice disability or death just so kids can go to school? The reopen schools crowd eagerly ignores the existence of the adults in schools each time they say “the kids will be fine if they get infected.”

And even if the lives of the school teachers and staff do not matter (to the open schools now crowd), each infection that is facilitated by in-person schooling leaves the facility at the end of the day and goes into the broader community. Each one of those infections can infect household and family members (kids have parents and guardians, too), they can seed superspreader events, and they can be the source of a mutation that creates a new variant.

And because of the aggressive spread of this disease, with record numbers of infections, even though it is “mild” compared to Delta, it is straining the capacity of the medical system, and it is crushing the spirits of medical workers who have been struggling to save lives for the past two years, largely without the support of the rest of society. This means that even if the “only people” who die from Covid-19 are those who “refuse to get vaccinated” or “had underlying conditions,” people are going to indirectly die from medical care they cannot get for other conditions because of the inability of the medical system to deal with the surge. By the way, those who refuse to get vaccinated and those with underlying conditions shouldn’t be dying from a disease that we can prevent from spreading.

There is simply no ethical medical or social justification for schools to be open right now. Kids are not safer at schools. Kids’ mental health is far more impacted by being surrounded by mass disability and death, and by adults and institutions who refuse to protect them. And as stated before, kids are also not the only people in schools, and schools are not separate from the broader community. Perhaps the most compelling unethical justification that can be made for schools to be open right now is that businesses need schools open so that their workers do not have to stay home with their kids during working hours. If we assume that keeping the wheels of capitalism turning is more important than the health of society, I guess we can accept the contribution schools are making to mass disability and death.

But, other than the ethical piece, there is another big problem with that argument. When infection becomes too widespread, the wheels of capitalism will begin to slow down. When people are seeing large numbers of their friends, family, and acquaintances getting infected, and some suffering greatly from it, many of them are going to modify their behavior. That modification may include staying home whether or not businesses or schools like it. It may lead to them dropping out of the workforce, or unenrolling from covid petri dish schools. It may lead to them withdrawing from engaging in the consumerism that the economy is built upon. And even if enough people are willing to risk infection, to work through infection and the lingering effects of infection, and are willing to head out into public while infected (as is now encouraged by business and the government), wide-scale illness will eventually leave businesses and schools without enough employees and customers to operate.

And we may be on the cusp of that right now. We were greatly saddened that schools did not preemptively go remote at the end of the winter break, when this wave was upon us. We had hoped that the schools would take their responsibility to their local communities seriously. Instead, they brought students, teachers, and staff together and contributed to the spread of the disease. Yes, public schools have the Governor to deal with; and they must deal with business interests, politicians, and parents who demand schools stay open; and with grifters who seek to profit from promoting the most selfish aspects of our nature; and they need to concern themselves with seat time for the sake of revenue. And yes, private schools also have to deal with much of the same else enrollment may plummet when families pull their kids from school because they don’t want to pay full tuition for remote schooling. But none of those pressures justify in-person schooling.

As of today, it looks like some schools in Central Texas are finally going remote or closing, at least for days at a time. But they are not doing it to stop the spread. They are doing it because they don’t have the ability to keep schools open because too many teachers and staff are unable to work because they’ve been infected or exposed (or disabled or killed). The schools should have gone remote during this most infectious wave of the pandemic before exposing the people they are supposed to care about and serve to the disease within the walls of the schoolhouse. The least they can do now is to go remote to help cut off routes of transmission within the schools, and into the community, so that we can expedite the end of this wave.

——

Cover photo by MChe Lee on Unsplash