Covid-19 Updates: With Learning Upended, Parents Pull Children From U.S. Public Schools

12 min readNov 28, 2020

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U.S. public school enrollment drops as parents, frustrated by lockdown, pull their children out.

A young student being walked to P.S. 91, the Albany Avenue School in Brooklyn, earlier this month. Public school enrollment is down in New York City.Credit…Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Two and a half months into the school year, Massachusetts compiled its data and found sobering results: Enrollment in public schools was down 37,000, or almost 4 percent, from last year, a startling drop for a system that has mostly held steady.

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Though no nationwide data is available, similar snapshots are emerging all over the country. Enrollment in New York City public schools is down 31,000 students, or 3.2 percent, according to preliminary data obtained by Chalkbeat.

Officials in Montana reported a drop of 2 percent. Wisconsin and Missouri have reported declines of 3 percent. North Carolina has reported a drop of 4 percent.

The reason is no mystery. With public schools mostly shifting to remote or hybrid learning, parents are pulling their children out entirely, opting to keep them at home or looking for options that offer more in-person instruction.

“In some cases, the charter schools are taking them, in some cases privates and parochials,” said Glenn Koocher, who heads the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. “The bigger tragedy is that some kids aren’t getting anything, because they’ve fallen off the map.”

Mr. Koocher said he believes a third of the students that left public schools this year are in that category. “The districts have lost touch with them,” he said. “They’re staying home, probably doing nothing, and we’re out of touch with them.”

A reverse phenomenon has taken place at private schools, many of which began the school year with in-person learning. In New England, 36 percent of independent schools reported a rise in enrollment in September compared with last year, according to the National Association of Independent Schools.

The National Association of Independent Schools said in August that 58 percent of its schools had reported an increase in interest from the previous summer.

In some areas, like the tristate region outside New York City, private schools have had a surge of affluent parents intent on getting their children into in-person classes for the fall. That option wasn’t possible at many public schools and in big cities hit hard in the pandemic.

“Applications are up, and enrollment is up,” Carole J. Everett, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools, told The Times last month. “This is largely due to people fleeing the city and public school parents disappointed that their schools haven’t opened in person. It really picked up over the summer and has continued into the fall.”

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Some unenrolled students may return to the public school system next year, when in-person teaching resumes, Mr. Kooker said. But if they don’t, school budgets are likely to suffer, because state aid to schools is distributed on a per-pupil basis. That matters more in poorer neighborhoods, since wealthy school districts augment state funding using local property taxes.

“You still have to have the teachers,” he said. “You don’t lose money in school expenses, but you lose state aid.”

— Ellen Barry

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U.S. coronavirus infections shoot past 13 million, even as the Thanksgiving holiday blurs state reporting.

Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Salgu Wissmath for The New York Times

James Estrin/The New York Times

Walker Pickering for The New York Times

James Estrin/The New York Times

The number of coronavirus infections in the United States shot past 13 million on Friday, worsening the world’s largest outbreak and bringing the country close to an unprecedented four million cases for the month of November.

The milestone came as Americans are traveling by the millions for the long Thanksgiving weekend and amid a Black Friday that looked different from holidays past.

The U.S. has had one of the world’s highest per capita caseloads in the past week. And every day for more than two weeks, the country has set records for the number of people in the hospital, with the latest figure surging past 90,000 for the first time on Thursday.

The Thanksgiving holiday, however, has caused skews in reporting at the end of the week, with a steep drop-off in new cases reported on Thursday, and then a huge jump on Friday. Many states did not report data on the Thanksgiving holiday, when the national tally rose more than 103,000 cases and more than 1,100 deaths — far lower levels than on the previous Thursday, Nov. 19, when 187,000 cases and 1,962 deaths were recorded.

For that very reason, the numbers were artificially high on Friday, when many states reported two days’ worth of data. That pushed the country past 200,000 cases in a single day for the first time, with more than 205,000 reported as of late Friday night, along with more than 1,400 deaths. The preceding Friday, Nov. 20, the reports were more than 198,600 infections and more than 1,950 deaths.

The blurry data could persist. Access to testing around the country was likely to have decreased for a few days, meaning more infections could go uncounted. In Louisiana, testing sites run by the National Guard were slated to be closed both Thursday and Friday. In Wisconsin, some National Guard testing sites closed all week.

“I just hope that people don’t misinterpret the numbers and think that there wasn’t a major surge as a result of Thanksgiving, and then end up making Christmas and Hanukkah and other travel plans,” Dr. Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University and an emergency physician, told The Associated Press.

Public health experts repeatedly warned Americans to stay home on Thanksgiving, and many heeded the advice. But while overall travel within the country was down significantly from prior years, the Transportation Security Administration reported that more than half a million people flew on Thursday alone, in addition to the approximately four million who had already traveled since Sunday. AAA had projected a downturn in road travel, and still expected tens of millions of people to drive to celebrations.

Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention list of higher-risk activities for spreading Covid-19 included “going shopping in crowded stores just before, on, or after Thanksgiving,” an attempt to persuade people to sit tight — or make purchases online — on Black Friday. Many stores took precautions, channeling customers to online sales and limiting their numbers inside brick-and-mortar stores, but crowding was still evident in some places.

And significant restrictions are growing. On Friday, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health called on residents to stay home, after its five-day average of new cases surpassed 4,700. Nearly 400,000 people in the county have had the virus, more than in most states.

The directive allows for church services and protests, noting that both are constitutionally protected rights, and also permits takeout and delivery services for dining establishments.

— Lauren Wolfe, Mitch Smith and Lisa Waananen Jones

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In Kansas City, two Covid deaths in one weekend drive home the risks to firefighters.

A funeral procession in April for a Kansas City firefighter who died of the coronavirus. More than 200 members of the city’s fire department have tested positive since the pandemic began.Credit…Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

The blows came in quick succession when the Kansas City Fire Department lost two longtime firefighters to Covid-19 last weekend, one of them a captain, as the coronavirus continued to rage across much of the Midwest.

More than 200 members of the department have tested positive since the pandemic began, and at least 70 of those have active infections now, according to Fire Chief Donna Lake. The two over the weekend were the second and third to die of the disease; the first was an emergency medic in the spring.

“It affects morale in a big way,” Chief Lake said of the losses.

The International Association of Fire Fighters, which represents more than 320,000 professional firefighters across the United States, said that more than 3,400 members have had the virus nationwide, and 22 have died. There have been many more cases among the nation’s roughly 750,000 volunteer firefighters.

“When we think of firefighters, the first thing we think of is fire trucks,” said Doug Stern, a spokesman for the union. “But in the overwhelming majority of America, firefighters are also paramedics. They’re also E.M.T.s. They’re the first link in the public health chain. They really are health workers, much like doctors and nurses.”

Firefighters are often working in “uncontrolled environments,” he said, dealing with emergencies in houses, buildings or vehicles where surfaces may not have been disinfected, and encountering people who may not be wearing masks or taking other protective measures.

To mitigate those risks, the Kansas City Fire Department has changed its protocols, and now initially sends in a single person in full protective gear to assess some emergency situations, instead of a whole group going in right away.

But the department has also had to send exposed workers back to the front lines, Chief Lake said, because lengthy quarantines were leaving the department critically short of personnel.

The two who died over last weekend were Capt. Robert Rocha, 60, a 29-year veteran of the department, and Scott Davidson, 45, a communications specialist and paramedic. Both were remembered as vital figures in the community.

Captain Rocha “was a very gregarious, larger-than-life kind of guy” who mentored younger firefighters, Chief Lake said. She recalled Mr. Davidson as a family man who brought a valuable frontline perspective from his paramedic service to his more recent job in communications.

The department deems death from Covid-19 to be in the line of duty, and firefighters across the country are known for turning out to ceremonially honor fallen colleagues. But the pandemic necessarily constrained the send-offs in Kansas City, with attendance limits at services and social distance between members of the department who stood at curbside to salute a procession for Mr. Davidson.

A drive-through visitation for Captain Rocha will be held on Sunday, and his funeral service will be closed to the public in person but streamed online.

— Melina Delkic

To keep up with pandemic boom in online shopping, Amazon hired 427,300 employees in 10 months.

An employee scanning packages at an Amazon distribution center in Staten Island, N.Y., this week.Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Amazon has embarked on an extraordinary hiring binge this year, vacuuming up an average of 1,400 new workers a day and solidifying its power as online shopping becomes more entrenched during the coronavirus pandemic.

The spree has accelerated since the onset of the pandemic, which has turbocharged Amazon’s business and made it a winner of the crisis. Starting in July, the company brought on about 350,000 employees, or 2,800 a day. Most have been warehouse workers, but Amazon has also hired software engineers and hardware specialists to power enterprises such as cloud computing, streaming entertainment and devices, which have boomed in the pandemic.

The scale of hiring is even larger than it may seem because the numbers do not account for employee churn, nor do they include the 100,000 temporary workers who have been recruited for the holiday shopping season. They also do not include what internal documents show as roughly 500,000 delivery drivers, who are contractors and not direct Amazon employees.