Reopening in the Shadow of COVID-19: Beginning the First Full Coronavirus School Year

This is the seventh report in the "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic" series, covering how schools reopened for the 2020-21 school year. This report focuses on the new school year using the seventh wave of COVID-19 Educational Response Longitudinal Survey (C-ERLS) data, gathered between August 3 and September 17 from the same sample of school districts, to describe again how public schools have changed operations to reopen this fall during the continuing pandemic. Findings showed: (1) about two in five schools began the year offering an option for full-time in-person instruction, about a third were fully remote, and the remaining 25 percent offered a hybrid model or in person for select grades; (2) overall, COVID-19 case rates were weakly related to reopening models, and higher percentages of schools returned in person in small, low-minority, low-poverty, and high-achieving districts; (3) eleven percent of all schools shifted from remote-only instruction to more in-person instruction by October 1, and most of these schools were in red states; and (4) districts' remote instruction offerings were, indeed, a large improvement from the "emergency learning" remote instruction in the spring, as measured by multiple indicators. [For "School District Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Round 6, Ending the Year of School Closures," see ED606204.]