Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
it's back to school time finally and
people are excited i'm looking forward
to see my friends and eat lunch
and go to visas
i'm most looking forward to homework and
friends and i i'm looking forward to
having some time
away from her but parents and kids we
talked to also had some worries i'm
concerned about
delta being a stronger variant and and
kids getting sicker
i don't want to catch corona
or delta the numbers increasing to the
point where
schools will have to shift again
and go from fully in person possibly to
hybrid and possibly back to fully remote
i'm really concerned
about how they're going to be adjusting
to
being at school all day
with maskcon
and
if they're gonna get aggravated
[Music]
since spring of 2020 when the
coronavirus first forced the us into
lockdown students have not had a normal
year of school full-time remote school
hybrid school some going back to
in-person school only to get sent back
into lockdown with new outbreaks kids
have been through a lot and not to
mention it's been a tough year and a
half all around
now a lot of places are going back to
in-person school with so much still in
flux
parents kids educators have questions is
it safe to go back how can we protect
ourselves and with all those school
disruptions how has that affected
students learning and how will they make
up for it what's ahead and how can the
adults and students lives support them
in facing it
this is nova now your classroom to look
at the science behind the headlines i'm
alok patel
[Music]
my name is lindsey marr i'm a professor
of civil and environmental engineering
at virginia tech and i study viruses in
the air an engineer who studies viruses
it really doesn't fall within any one
discipline
we would struggle to
get our research published because
journals would say it's either two
medical or to engineering depending on
the journal but then came covet 19 and
everyone needed to know how does this
coronavirus spread is it from surfaces
we touch from droplets
or is it airborne all around us and so
when the pandemic began i knew uh that
there was a very small number of
researchers who had studied this
question in detail maybe five or so
around the world
um
and i knew that there was a lot of
inaccurate information out there and now
lindsey marr is at the forefront of some
very important science
studying how the virus gets passed from
person to person and how we can protect
ourselves from catching it
she was one of the leading voices that
lobbied the world health organization to
recognize airborne transmission of
coronavirus
but back when she first got her phd in
environmental engineering viruses were
not on her radar my background is
actually in air pollution and i was
studying emissions of particles from
vehicles and other sources then 13 years
ago she had her first child and when she
put him in daycare she often got the
call all parents dread
he was sick and she needed to pick him
up
and i'd noticed that often
half the kids or more would be sick at
the same time and i knew the daycare
center had very good hygiene practices
lots of hand washing and surface
cleaning
and given the
speed at which it seemed like all the
kids became sick at once i started to
wonder if the virus was transmitting
through the air she looked into it and
realized how little we actually knew
about whether viruses are spread through
the air
versus by touching or close contact
her engineering background actually
applied to this issue
people who have studied
particulate air pollution and understand
how
particles move through the air and how
we're exposed to them that we can apply
those same tools and knowledge and
concepts to how viruses move through the
air because it's all the same physics
really because lindsay maher wanted to
understand why her child was getting
sick at daycare she can now teach us how
we're going to keep our kids safe from
the coronavirus in school she's been
working to get the right information to
the authorities and the public
because initially in the u.s there was a
lot of emphasis on
contaminated surfaces and hand washing
and
really
kind of
overlooking or downplaying the role of
the virus being in the air
people would say oh no it's not airborne
it's not airborne um no it's close
contact it's when people cough in each
other's faces but the evidence
accumulated over the months and uh you
know i think now it's pretty widely
accepted so how actually does airborne
transmission work when someone does
cough yes they emit those large droplets
maybe but in addition they're emitting
hundreds or thousands of microscopic
ones that we call aerosols when they're
talking and this is important because we
found that transmission was occurring
without symptoms so before people were
coughing meaning they're just breathing
and talking well you know what they're
releasing aerosols that may contain
virus in them they behave like cigarette
smoke particles because they are very
similar in size you can see cigarette
smoke particles because there are so
many of them
and with the virus you can't usually see
those because there's far fewer um so
it's it's like someone's smoking a
really tiny little cigarette and if you
think about how cigarette smoke travels
and spreads out
you can start to imagine how the tiny
microscopic droplets people breathe out
might be traveling all around if
someone's smoking indoors and the room
is poorly ventilated that smoke can
build up in the air and people will be
exposed to it
even if they're not close to the person
but outdoors it's rapidly dispersed
because there's so much dilution from
the wind and
things spreading out if you're in a
place that's poorly ventilated that that
means that people's exhaled breath is
building up in the air but if you will
go and open up a couple of windows on
opposite sides of the room so you get
some cross ventilation or you turn on
[Music]
a fan
some kind of heating ventilation or air
conditioning system that brings in
outdoor air then that will help flush
out the
virus from that space
and also crowding matters because it
means that you're closer to other people
and so you're more likely to be kind of
in their respiratory plume and breathing
high levels of virus compared to if
you're farther away knowing how the
virus spreads is key to understanding
how we'll protect students in school
there's a lot of variation between
schools right now not only in their
physical properties like some schools
are big some are small some have less
windows and then obviously there's
different ordinances and different
states can you give us a scenario in
which parents are like hey i'm not
worried
that's tough because parents like to
worry but that's true i would have much
less worry if i knew that the school
required and enforced masks and the kids
were in a classroom where
they
either had the windows open or they had
a portable air cleaner with hepa high
efficiency particulate air filtration in
it
because even if you can't have
good ventilation flushing the air in
that room that filter can help remove
virus from the air the next layer of
protection is literally a layer
masks any mask is better than no mask
lindsey marr says people may not believe
masks protect us because they imagine
they work like sieves you know you're
sieving your pasta and the things that
are bigger than the holes don't go
through so people think the virus must
be smaller than the holes in a mask
right you know 0.1 microns in size
that's super tiny how is that not
getting through my mask yes the virus is
very small but it's released in these
respiratory droplets and aerosols that
are larger and even if all the water
evaporates there's still a lot more
other stuff than the virus in there the
salts and proteins and other things that
are in our respiratory fluid and there's
way more of that than the virus
so if you have a whole virus there it's
going to be probably at least five times
larger than the virus itself
the second thing is that mass do not
work by sieving let's say your virus
particle is flowing through that fabric
there's a number of different ways it
can be trapped so you have to kind of
shrink yourself down to the size of a of
something kind of microscopic and
imagine you are trying to weave your way
through the individual fibers in a mask
the virus has too much momentum kind of
like if the car is going around a corner
fast so the virus can't make the turn
and smashes into fibers got it
and another way is that if they're
really small then they have this random
motion that they get that we call
brownian motion kind of like a drunk
person stumbling around
and they can actually end up crashing
into these fibers and sticking and being
removed that way too so there's no
question that mass work on the basis of
physics but maybe this physics is a
little too theoretical how about some
real world evidence
and then we've seen plenty of
epidemiological evidence by now showing
that mass help reduce transmission help
protect others and help protect the
wearer she helps us understand how masks
work if all the students in a classroom
wore them let's assume that you have
someone who's infected in in those
classrooms and let's say that you have a
kind of average cloth mask about 50
efficient in reducing the amount of
virus in the air
the magical thing about universal
masking is that if everyone's wearing a
mask you get this multiplicative effect
where the person who's sick whatever
they're releasing into the air is
reduced by half
and then for the other people who are
exposed whatever they're breathing in
from the air around them is also reduced
by half so you get overall a 75
reduction
um of what people are breathing so
if your chances of
getting sick
were
directly correlated with the amount of
virus in the air
then if everyone's wearing a mask you
reduce that risk by 75 percent that's a
big assumption but that's that's a
starting place that's a lot of
protection from something that's so
simple a child could use it young kids
are pretty
amenable to what we teach them they
learn how to tie their shoes they know
how to wear their underwear you teach
them how to wear a mask
and they'll wear a mask especially if
they see other people around them doing
it and no there's no evidence they're
bad for kids they don't interfere with
breathing and the supposed studies
saying they trap carbon dioxide have
been debunked
as long as your child can remove a mask
unassisted they're safe
i asked lindsay maher what should we
look for in a mask you're looking for
two key
factors one is good filtration and that
depends on the mask material what it's
made out of and the second is how well
it fits just a simple cloth mask i would
put that in the category
of good because anything is better than
nothing
better options which are for example a
cloth mask
that has a pocket in it where you can
put a filter inside there or
better yet has a filter built into it
and that the filter spins the entire
area of the mask and
is
made out of surgical type mask material
or is a hepa filter and can filter out
at least 95 percent of particles you've
probably heard that n95 masks are the
best option but you can't get them for
kids
lindsey marr says the chinese kn 95s are
available for kids and then the south
korean version which is the kf94
those are made of
really good filtering material and are
made to fit tightly
and the fit is really important because
if it leaks like if you have gaps on the
sides of the mask or around the nose or
under the chin it's like having giant
holes in your mask she says schools
shouldn't overspend on cleaning products
and hand sanitizer they need to put
resources into ventilation
as far as the surfaces go
you know i could see an argument for
some extra attention to cleaning the
high touch surfaces such as doorknobs
beyond that you know cleaning everything
else with multiple times per day or
shutting down the whole school for a
whole day to do deep cleaning that is
definitely overboard it is possible of
course for the virus to transmit
through touching a contaminated surface
that risk is very low and just given the
amount of virus that's in those droplets
and what we know about how well they
survive on different surfaces
for the amount that in real life that
ends up being deposited on there
studies shown including our own
show that there's probably just not
enough there we're sharing the air all
the time and it's much more easier i i
think to
be exposed to the virus that way so
ventilation masks this hopefully sounds
pretty straightforward when we combine
that with other things like
maintaining a little bit of distancing
and having good ventilation
that
along with hygiene of course that that
we can achieve
strong overall protection but you have
to combine these things what is your
biggest concern in sending your kids
back to school
my biggest concern is lunch time eating
in a cafeteria is my pandemic nightmare
scenario in order to eat you have to
remove your mask there are hundreds of
kids in there together they're seated
closely together at these long tables
everyone's trying to talk and be heard
that's kind of the worst possible
situation crowding close together loud
talking you release
respiratory droplets and aerosols when
you talk and the louder you talk the
more you release that is just uh virus
central i envision all these smokers
sitting in a room together puffing away
with you know 200 people and
unmasked yeah that's my nightmare so
lindsay marsh strongly recommends lunch
outdoors if that's not possible then
maybe having kids eat in their
classrooms even opening the windows for
20 minutes during lunch will make a big
difference
staggering kids lunch periods would help
and keeping them as short as possible
would you send your kid to school
unmasked
and if you would what's the scenario in
which you would feel comfortable doing
that
if they're vaccinated number one
although one of my kids is not
vaccinated but even if if she were not
vaccinated if cases were low um low
meaning maybe less than 10 per 100 000
over a seven days
so yes there is that that scenario but
we are very far from that scenario right
now so with the previous variants in a
school cafeteria let's say i could see
maybe you have someone sick and maybe
a handful of other people around them
get sick but with delta now i see
everyone in there becoming infected all
at once from having one or two
infectious people in there
seeing that people were becoming
infected with short exposure times
and
the rapid rise in cases and the fact
that cases are much higher now than they
were two months ago
that all makes me more nervous than i
was a couple of months ago would you be
in favor of postponing school's
reopening school is really important for
a kid's health and well-being even with
an airborne virus we know that when you
employ
strong layered protections
kids can be in school without having
large outbreaks so i am firmly in the
camp of
let's go back to school
with strong precautions including
masking including good ventilation
and thinking about how you're going to
handle those higher risk situations such
as lunch and doing everything you can to
increase distancing and reduce crowding
and for her musical exit lindsay mara
offers what's become her theme song
these days the police every breath you
take
so we know we can get students back to
school safely when we come back we'll
talk about how to get them back to
learning and thriving despite all
they've been going through
[Music]
because of the drastic changes to how
students have had to attend school in
the past 18 months there's been a lot of
attention on how that's affected kids
learning it comes as no surprise that
there's been learning loss during the
covet 19 pandemic students learning from
home many with little or no access to
technology some kids are seven and a
half months behind when it comes to
reading and seven months behind in math
as well for perspective a full school
year is nine and a half months students
learning remotely did worse on the
annual exam overall my senior did
exceptionally well
she was on-site
my junior was all virtual and it
terrible but even experts were startled
to see the results in a first of its
kind study to measure the learning loss
and even more shock to see the
disparities for students of color it's
estimated from the study that for black
and brown children that's about 80
thousand dollars of earnings loss which
is about a year or two years worth of
income for the average uh black family
in new jersey researchers at the center
on reinventing public education examined
hundreds of studies trying to measure
what they've lost they estimated that
students are behind what they would
normally learn in a year by several
months
monica bot phd is the senior research
director for the university of chicago
education lab
she says we have a way to go to
understand the full learning cost of the
pandemic
i also think that what we're going to
see is that there's a lot of
heterogeneity some kids actually thrived
with remote learning who might not have
in a traditional school system
other students really need that
in-person learning and have been very
very disconnected from school as we can
see in the data but even before the
pandemic there was already a lot of
inequity in the system
low-income students and students of
color had less access to educational
resources and opportunities
they also had more obstacles like work
responsibilities or language barriers
so back in what we might fondly be
thinking of as normal times the learning
gaps were already daunting think about
this challenge you are a teacher you
have about 30 students in your classroom
on average where you have this very very
big spread in student learning in terms
of you know having kids who are at a
sixth grade math level versus a college
level and your job is to teach them all
that is a heroic task if ever there was
one and yet we ask millions of teachers
to do that on a daily basis to add
another layer of inequality
the disruptions of the past year and a
half have not affected everyone equally
some kids had better access to digital
tools some kids home environments were
more conducive to learning than others
not surprisingly studies have shown that
with the pandemic vulnerable students
fell even farther behind
educators have plans to get students
back on track
some started early with summer school
others are adding extra time to the
school day or days to the school year
itself some are allowing parents to have
their kids repeated grade to give them a
chance to catch up for kids who were
already doing better prior to
the pandemic
we think that they're going to have the
tools to recover faster but programs
targeting the especially vulnerable are
crucial for years monica butt and the
education lab have been gathering
evidence for a promising intervention
high dosage tutoring maybe you think of
tutoring as paying someone after class
to give you extra coaching
but high dosage tutoring is included in
the school day
students who need help with math for
example have daily sessions with a tutor
as one of their classes
in the version the education lab tested
with ninth and tenth graders
each tutor worked with two students at a
time
tutors could work out exactly where
students problem areas were coordinate
with their teachers and target help to
the level they needed students learned
two to three times as much as their
peers who did not participate that is
enormous monica butt thinks our current
challenges demand we think more boldly
about new ways to address the gaps in
education that kind of innovation and
idea generation even though i know
people are very tired right now is going
to be really important with this drive
to get students caught up it's going to
be a busy year i mean coming back to
school is stressful in any year
but students have already dealt with so
much to prepare them for what's ahead we
need to take that into account when we
consider what's made learning so
difficult when you encounter a stressor
it narrows your cognition to focus on
that stressor at hand which means you're
not likely to be able to focus on that
algebra problem that's emma adam phd a
developmental psychobiologist at
northwestern university who studies the
effects of stress on adolescents and
young adults i study both the
perceptions of stress the kinds of
things that cause stress in adolescence
and also the implications of stress for
their bodies and brains and their
long-term health and well-being
justin janison a parent who is also a
school counselor has seen firsthand how
some kids have been affected i work with
kids
grades kindergarten to fifth grade
and
the kids that i knew had mental health
struggles before continued to struggle
and some of them much more during the
pandemic
and i think even more alarming were kids
that were not on my radar um who had
never had any kind of mental health
struggles prior to the pandemic but then
started to present with some of those
uh different things that their families
and caregivers were really concerned
about emma adam helps us understand how
stress works
i think the average person especially
after the past year and a half has their
own definition of stress and how it's
affected them but how does a scientist
like you define stress and how do you
measure and study it
by definition it involves both
a perception of a stressor in your
environment of something challenging
but also it involves the biological
changes that occur that are part and
parcel of the stress response
so your heart rate goes up your cortisol
levels arise there's a bunch of changes
that happen in the body to kind of give
you the energy to face the demands of
the day
that's the good part of stress but um if
you have too high demands and not enough
coping uh resources to meet those
demands those changes in your body that
occur can actually then become harmful
over the long term can you separate the
types of stress that are considered bad
versus the types of stress that you're
like hey that's normal that's the normal
human being roller coaster the
problematic types of stress include
things like trauma
you have a major threat to the self
either your body or your psyche
threat of injury threat of harm and then
chronic stress so these systems in our
bodies are intended to respond and then
recover respond and then recover and so
if you're in um stress activation mode
all the time you don't have any chance
to recover some of the healing and
restorative aspects of the body are put
on hold that means that the chronic
stress of dealing with the pandemic for
all these months can take a toll
and so you can imagine putting those
kind of
responses on hold for a long time is
problematic for for health and also for
cognition emma adam collects data for
long periods that allow her to track the
relationships between experiences and
stress reactions over time
the general methods that i use in my
research are diary studies so i um
recruit adolescents
and then they fill out sometimes
daily diaries sometimes diaries multiple
points of the day where they're
reporting on who where they are who
they're with what they're feeling what
they're thinking and the stressors that
they encountered and how stressful they
were
the diaries are typically gathered
through an online survey sent out by
text or email they get asked about
different sources of stress from
homework to romance in addition to doing
reporting on those diaries typically
adolescents then um give me a small
sample of saliva or spit giving me the
uh title of the spit queen around
northwestern
that's right your spit can say a lot
about your stress level in that spit we
can measure cortisol which is a stress
hormone i also measure sleep using like
fitbits on steroids so those take fine
measurements of physical activity
when the pandemic hit they had to stop
the parts of the study involving
personal contact
including all that great spit collecting
but they still had the diary reports the
good thing was we were already in the
field with adolescents measuring their
stress levels they quickly shifted to
measuring the impact of the pandemic on
adolescent stress
unlike studies that started in response
to the crisis their study had a baseline
of data from before kovitz struck
while they analyzed the latest data
m adam can talk about results from data
collected from the end of march through
july of 2020. we actually found some
surprising results there was a little
bit of relief for some adolescents and
reduction in school-related stress in
terms of school schedule pressure when
when uh schools were closed and they
moved to online learning but however
there were increases in a bunch of other
types of stress for everybody there were
increases in loneliness which we
shouldn't find surprising in another
study actually that the american
psychological association um fielded in
august of 2020. the really most notable
stressor was the actual uncertainty
about the school year so one thing that
our bodies and brains really don't like
is not being able to predict our
environments
that lack of being able to
plan for the upcoming school year or
lack of ability to plan for their future
were some of the largest stressors that
youth especially college-age young
adults were reporting but some were
worse off than others there were
disparities by parent education level in
terms of the impacts of the pandemic
with much worse impacts on stress and
mood for
youth from lower and actually moderate
education families and also one of the
reasons that we might be seeing
increases in depression and again that
is likely to be borne unequally by
different socioeconomic groups and
different racial groups given that
there's been more
more deaths
in individuals of color and there's been
more death in lower income groups the
parents and the families are just
encountering more stress they're in the
jobs that are um as front line workers
they're more likely to get exposed to
covet as a result they are more likely
to have encountered job loss uh and they
are more likely to have a challenge with
working at home her previous research
has also pointed to an important source
of stress the other thing that really
stood out uh in my research in terms of
predicting biological stress
was
experiences of racial discrimination
[Music]
the pandemic brought on a rise in
anti-asian hate in its first summer
incidents of black people dying at the
hands of the police also dominated the
headlines
emma adams team is currently analyzing
how these may have caused additional
stress for young people
so we see these differences in stress
exposure and stress biology as a
probably an understudied pathway
explaining some of the disparities in
health and educational outcomes and
they're looking for ways to interrupt
that pathway we're
engaged in a
um racial ethnic identity promotion
intervention where um designed by
adriana eumanya taylor at harvard where
we're
having group discussions about race
about discrimination about identity and
the meaning of identity and it it turns
out that having a strong ethnic identity
helps to buffer you from the stresses of
discrimination and race related stress
one of the most effective ways to reduce
the damaging effects of stress on the
mind and body for anyone is to improve
sleep because your body expects a
certain sleep like cycle being
consistent giving that predictability to
your body helps you sleep well and that
really has positive effects both on
mental health and physical health and
academic outcomes there's a whole bunch
of sleep hygiene tips that you can find
on the internet
but i really want to emphasize that
anything that increases your feelings of
safety security regularity
predictability is is good for sleep and
so for younger kids
a bedtime routine involving parents
who give you that sense of safety and
security is really helpful as we now
reopen schools
and we have all these kids going back
now to in-person learning what potential
stressors are you worried about
one
problem is that we've been getting very
used to social isolation
and have less recent practice with
entering social situations and that can
be really scary and uh create anxiety
just as we found there was kind of a bit
of a relief from that social stress at
the beginning of the pandemic i'm
worried about increases in anxiety in
kids as they re-enter the school
situation and particularly for kids that
might be prone to social anxiety that's
a concern for angelica
a parent who spoke with us i have two
children my oldest is gabriel he's 10
years old and he's autistic he also have
social anxiety and he has a service dog
to support him with his needs
he had a huge development
with his social emotion of this
year's remote learning because of the
pandemic i was able to be by their side
and break down the social emotional
situations they have at school
i'm hoping they're able to
replicate that at school
emma adam continues
the other worry is that
the for a lot of kids the schools
they're starting in person 100 right
away i would actually want a slower
transition back to in-person learning
with
perhaps a hybrid model for a little bit
just so that the shock of those social
transitions unfolds a little more more
slowly
the other thing that's happening is that
kids and adolescents are going back to
early school start times uh
something that's going to eat into sleep
time okay so how can parents help uh do
their best to try to give guidance
regarding bedtimes and wake times and
convey how important it is to get
sufficient and regular sleep schedule
and then the
other thing parents can do is be on the
lookout for signs of depression and
anxiety you know everybody's gonna have
a bit of the jitters but you know if
your child isn't eating if uh your child
is losing weight or gaining weight
rapidly if their mood seems
much more subdued than usual over a
longer period of time these are maybe
signs that clinical intervention is
required but emma adam has also found
reasons for hope
we might be going back as we emerge
hopefully at some point from this
pandemic to a slightly kinder more
empathetic society because so many
people have experienced stress
loneliness and depression during this
pandemic there's been a bit of a sea
change in terms of acceptance of mental
health
issues
one thing we did notice in the low to
moderate education group of adolescents
is with the pandemic came an increase in
caring and so i'm hoping that as kids
get back to school what they'll
experience is a kinder
environment both in terms of how their
peers treat them and also in terms of
how teachers treat them and the
administrations
[Music]
nova now is a production of gbh and prx
it's produced by terence bernardo ari
daniel jocelyn gonzalez isabel hibbard
sander lopez monsalve and rosslyn
tordesillas
julia court and chris schmidt are the
co-executive producers of nova sookie
bennett is senior digital editor
christina manan is associate researcher
robin kasmer is science editor and devin
robbins is managing producer of podcasts
at gbh
special thanks to kekka isabella
catherine justin and angelica whom you
heard at the top of the show and all who
shared their thoughts with us about
going back to school
our theme music is by the dj who takes
everyone to school in turntablism that's
dj kidd koala
i'm luke patel we'll be back in two
weeks that's more than enough time for
you to read up on various ways schools
are keeping kids safe
from mask and vaccine mandates to
ventilation strategies to staggered
classes to outdoor lunch periods to
random screening and testing and more
if you're interested in learning more
about the science behind kids and
parenting check out the youtube channel
parentalogic it's hosted by me and
comedian and mom bethany van delft we
explore everything from tantrums to
vaccinations that's parentalogic
p-a-r-e-n-t a-l-o-g-i-c
check out our show notes for a link
brought to you by nova and pbs digital
studios
gbh