Study: Arizona 4th least-safe state for school reopenings

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School bus MUSD
[Michelle Chance]

Arizona is the fourth least-safe state for schools to reopen amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.

The study by WalletHub, a personal finance site, looked at 15 key metrics across the 50 states to identify which had the safest conditions for reopening schools.

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Nationwide, students are learning online from home or in-person at school, or a hybrid of those experiences. In Arizona, counties had to meet COVID-19 benchmarks before in-person learning could resume. Locally, elementary students in the Maricopa Unified School District could return to school campuses on Sept. 14. Middle and high schoolers could opt to go back a week later. Students could maintain their home-based learning and many have decided to do that out of concern for their safety.

Among other criteria, the study looked at data including the number of child COVID-19 cases per 100,000 children, the average public-school class size, and the ratio of students to school nurses.

Arizona was the second-to-worst state for risk of COVID-19 infections, after Tennessee. It ranked second-worst for most COVID-19 cases per 100,000 children and tied – with two other states – for the most COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 children.

Two other criteria, pupil-teacher ratio and highest share of children living in crowded housing,  hurt the state’s overall ranking, according to the study. Arizona finished dead-last with the highest pupil-teacher ratio and tied for last with several other states for highest number of children living in crowded housing.

Arizona’s position in the ranking was improved somewhat as the state with the least overall likelihood of COVID-19 infections and as state with the third-lowest share of K-12 public school students who take school transportation.

Data used to create the ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Academy of Pediatrics, The COVID Tracking Project, Kaiser Family Foundation, School Bus Fleet Magazine, National Center for Education Statistics, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, covid19-projections.com, eSchool+ Initiative – Johns Hopkins University, American Civil Liberties Union and WalletHub research.