Dear Commons Community,

A new model coming out of Columbia University indicates that if the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak.  If the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided. Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May. According to the researchers, the model indicates that even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans, Seattle and other major cities. As reported by The New York Times.

Mariel Sander

Dear Commons Community,

Mariel Sander thought she would spend her final month at Columbia University going to parties, taking a modern dance class and road-tripping over spring break to five national parks.  Instead, she carried dead bodies off hospital beds and refrigerated trailers.

The coronavirus has killed more than 20,000 people in New York City, straining hospital morgues and funeral homes like never before. To manage the onslaught, hospitals brought on more than 100 temporary morgue workers, according to the city’s Department of Health.  As reported by The New York Times.

Ms. Sander was one of them. She had been sitting at home in Oldwick, N.J., restless after her Manhattan campus closed and eager to help in the pandemic. She emailed city hospitals until she ended up in the $25-per-hour job.

Ms. Sander, 21, spoke with The New York Times throughout her month working at a hospital morgue in Brooklyn, providing a rare glimpse inside an operation that is hidden from public view.

She encountered nightmarish moments — ripped body bags, amputated limbs, mysterious liquids pooled on bedsheets.

But she said she also developed a newfound respect for the rituals of death. The morgue team taught her to treat each body with care, a way to respect the family members who could not be inside the hospital to say goodbye to their loved ones.

The experience depleted her physically and emotionally. When carrying bodies, she sometimes glanced at their birth years, written on the body bags, to see how close in age they were to her parents.

“This experience taught me more about empathy than anything else,” she said.

Ms. Sander, who was not authorized to speak with the media about her job, shared her experiences on the condition that the hospital’s name not be published. Many details were corroborated by another employee who was also not authorized to speak with the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.  Here is one of her experiences.

April 23: The job takes a toll!

Dear Commons Community,

It is May and generally it is the month when colleges look at the preceding academic year and start planning for the new one.  This year has been unlike any other as the coronavirus pandemic took a toll on our entire way of life. The human and social upheaval has been and continues to be unprecedented in the United States which has recorded more 1.5 million coronavirus cases and almost 100,000 deaths.  Our social institutions have all had to make incredible adjustments to deal with the crisis.  In addition to the human tragedy, the virus has  devasted the financial stability of these institutions.  Colleges and university administrators  are now in deep discussions on how to recover their fiscal health as they move to the 2020-2021 academic year.  While it is likely that tuition-drive private colleges may have to make the most draconian decisions to survive, even those with substantial endowments and a stronger financial base will not be spared. The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning providing insights on how Johns Hopkins University will be dealing with a $375 million shortfall.  Essentially things are bad and likely to get worse next year. As reported:

The Johns Hopkins University forecast net losses for the next fiscal year to be as much as $375 million. The president, Ronald J. Daniels, also provided an unusually detailed picture of the scope of the challenges that the coronavirus has presented to his institution’s finances.

“The magnitude of the challenges we face is unlike any we have experienced in recent memory,” Daniels recently said in a statement. The university, he said, was experiencing “a dramatic and unprecedented contraction.”

Daniels also outlined a three-phase plan to mitigate losses, which includes cutting the salaries of top leaders, restricting new hires, and suspending contributions to employees’ retirement accounts. Here’s a closer look at phase one of his financial plan.

Suspension of retirement contributions

In fiscal 2021, the university will enact a one-year suspension of employer contributions to 403(b) and 457(f) retirement accounts—a step we take with great reluctance and appreciation for the sacrifice of our employees, but one that avoids across-the-board salary reductions and will help us to maintain employment for as much of our workforce as possible ahead. Note that university contributions to its defined-benefit pension plan will continue, and employees may make elective contributions to their own 403(b) and 457(b) accounts, subject to IRS maximums. The savings generated by this action will be reflected in a lower fringe benefit rate, which accrues to all divisions of the university, as well as sponsored research grants. This action is projected to save $100 million in FY 2021.

Salary reductions for university leaders

In recognition of the sacrifices that will be required across the university, Provost Kumar and I will reduce our salaries by 20% in the next fiscal year, and our deans and university officers will reduce their salaries by 10%.

Salary holds for faculty and staff

The university instituted a general prohibition and review of base salary increases effective April, and we will continue this hold for the next fiscal year (ending in June 2021). Again, this was a difficult but critical decision. This means that base salaries for FY21 will be the same as for FY20, with no annual merit increases. Any exceptions will require the written approval of the dean. Staff promotions will be considered on a case-by-case basis and will require the written approval of the dean or division director. Any exceptions, such as a reclassification, equity adjustment, or supplemental bonus, will also require the written approval of the dean. This action is projected to save approximately $20 million in FY 2021.

Restrictions on hiring

For staff positions—the university is restricting hiring through fiscal 2021. Employment offer letters issued through April 7 will be honored, but any new offers will require written approval of the dean or division director. We will allow flexibility for hiring to meet urgent or strategic needs, particularly roles essential to program or clinical activity related to the COVID pandemic.

For academic positions—the deans will review all approved or planned faculty searches with the provost (including those with donor support) to jointly determine which should continue and which should be paused. Hiring of postdoctoral trainees and part-time or casual faculty will also be restricted to those that are essential to instruction, research, and/or clinical operations. Hiring for those roles will require the approval of the dean. This action is projected to save $40 million in FY21.

Furloughs and layoffs

Furloughs and layoffs are regrettably expected to be necessary within some units of the university as an unavoidable consequence of the losses we are experiencing. Decisions regarding furloughs and layoffs will be made at the divisional and departmental level, including within university administration. Every effort will be made to provide transition assistance for affected employees during this extraordinarily difficult time.

Suspension of capital projects

The university has halted new capital projects over $100,000 through FY21, including information technology and equipment purchases, with exceptions granted for projects that address critical life safety or systems issues or meet an urgent strategic need. All active studies, design and construction projects are also subject to review. To-date, the divisions have reviewed their planned capital projects under $5 million in size and have decided to put 78 projects valued at $29 million on hold. Divisions are being asked similarly to review all ongoing and new projects under $100,000 to assess their operational necessity and to consider deferring or suspending them as appropriate. Recognizing both our commitments to funders and the importance of construction projects on the local economy, we also will continue with some capital projects that are largely supported by donor and/or sponsored funds.

Non-personnel expense reductions

The university procurement, technology, facilities and real estate teams will work with the divisions to revisit contracts for goods and services as well as construction and lease commitments to leverage the university’s purchasing power and long-standing relationships with vendors and set savings targets.  Due in part to the response to COVID-19, recent reductions in non-personnel expenses are expected to continue into the next fiscal year.  For example, the university is projecting to save nearly $10 million in non-sponsored research funded travel for the last three months of the current fiscal year.  Given likely continued limitations on travel through the fall, further savings are expected.   In undertaking these actions, it is important that we remain steadfast in our efforts to improve the university’s inclusionary and local building and buying efforts as committed through HopkinsLocal.

This fiscal scenario will be repeating itself throughout higher education in the coming months.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A livid Donald Trump flipped out after being criticized by Fox News’ Neil Cavuto (see video above) for taking the drug hydroxychloroquine, which has specifically not been approved for the coronavirus.  Trump said he’s done with Fox News and was ‘Looking For A New Outlet!’

The anti-malaria drug has not been approved for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but it has become a favorite talking-point in conservative media. 

Trump yesterday claimed he has been taking it after at least two people in the White House were diagnosed with the coronavirus infection. 

But Cavuto warned viewers not to emulate the president. 

“If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus … it will kill you,” Cavuto said. “I cannot stress this enough: This will kill you.”

While many Fox News hosts routinely lavish praise on the president ― and host Laura Ingraham has been one of the biggest media proponents of taking hydroxychloroquine ― the comments from Cavuto set Trump off.

He claimed on Twitter that he was ready to change the channel.

Trump’s comments also included praise for Roger Ailes, the late, disgraced Fox News CEO who left the network after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment.

Despite that history, Ailes served as an adviser to Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. 

Well there is always Rush Limbaugh, Mr. President!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

All over the world, there have been complaints from students, parents, high-school counselors and admissions officials, about problems with the Advanced Placement online exams. Many have described the same thing: technical glitches and an inability to submit answers.   As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“How many students ran into problems? After the first day, the College Board announced that AP testing was “off to a great start,” with less than 1 percent of about 376,000 students experiencing technical difficulties. The next day, the organization said less than 1 percent of approximately 640,000 students had hit a problem. Day 3? Less than 1 percent, it said, of 456,000 students.

If the College Board’s assertions were correct, that would still amount to tech trouble with nearly 15,000 exams. But the organization’s numbers didn’t seem to square with what many high-school counselors were hearing. In emails to The Chronicle, more than a dozen said 5 to 10 percent of their students had faced technical problems that kept them from submitting exam answers.

Adam Lindley, a college counselor at St. Francis High School, in Wheaton, Ill., said “probably more than half” of the 20 St. Francis students who took the Physics C exam got messages telling them that their answers hadn’t gone through — and that they could ask to retake the test in June. Some said they had no interest in doing that. They just wanted a refund that they apparently weren’t going to receive.

“You’ve got to consider the perspective of a 17-year-old kid who’s going through e-learning right now, and then has to deal with this,” Lindley said. “I would be pissed if I was them.”

Mitchell Lipton, co-director of college guidance at the Frisch School, in Paramus, N.J., knew of 10 students who had experienced technical difficulties (135 had signed up for AP exams, though he wasn’t sure how many had ended up taking them).

After submitting their responses, students were supposed to see a message that said, “Congratulations, your exam is complete.” If not, they were supposed to see a message that said, “We did not receive your responses.” But several students at Frisch didn’t see either, Lipton said: “A lot of kids didn’t know if their exam was received; they weren’t sure if they were done.”

That complicated their decisions about what to do next. “If a student isn’t sure whether they’ve submitted a response, they can request a makeup exam,” the College Board wrote in a midweek “Troubleshooting/FAQs” email to AP coordinators. “However, once they submit a makeup request, any response they submitted for the May exam will be invalidated.” Students had 48 hours from the end of each exam to request a makeup test.

What caused the submission problems in the first place? The College Board blamed users’ technology. “Given the wide variety of devices and browsers students are using, we anticipated that a small percentage of students would encounter technical difficulties,” the organization said in a written statement.

Later, the College Board said some students had run into trouble cutting and pasting their responses: “We took a closer look and found that outdated browsers were a primary cause of these challenges.” The organization reminded students to update their browsers.

Many students took to social media to say that their browsers had been up to date all along. Some said they had been able to submit answers to one question but not the other. What was the explanation for that?

“Hey @CollegeBoard, I followed all the rules,” one student tweeted. “My browser is right and my photos are pngs. However, you recently sent me an email saying that a file was corrupted. I have all the photos with my answers — why are you making me retake the test for a problem on your part?”

As AP complaints burned away on social media, the College Board acknowledged the frustrations of some test takers. “We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to complete their exam — whether for technical issues or other reasons,” the College Board said in a written statement. “We’re working to understand these students’ unique circumstances in advance of the June makeup exams.”

Some admissions officials blasted the organization. “The College Board’s failure to own its system’s failures or provide reasonable solutions for impacted students is a preview of the nightmare that we could expect with an online SAT or ACT,” Andrew B. Palumbo, assistant vice president for enrollment management at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, told The Chronicle. “Testing companies that operate without adequate oversight or input from school counselors and college-admissions professionals cannot be trusted to successfully transition these assessments online until they have addressed existing issues of inequity, security, and inadequate support and service for test takers.”

Many colleges have indicated that they will grant credit for this year’s AP exams, as they’ve done in the past. Still, Eric Nichols, vice president for enrollment management at Loyola University Maryland, wondered if widespread reports of testing complications would put colleges in a difficult position.

“I envision some students who had these issues — who are told they have no choice but to retest, who then end up not doing very well — asking colleges to give them credit anyway,” Nichols said. “We were already skeptical if the online test is really measuring ability in the content area well enough to still provide credit like we normally do. But in the end, we don’t want to disadvantage the student even more by not accepting them.”

As if all of that weren’t dramatic enough, a curious thing happened over on Reddit, the ever-buzzing hive of anonymous, often coarse discussion. A user by the name of dinosauce313 created a subreddit, or specialized forum, called APTests2020. And whoever it was invited test takers to cheat on the exams. (“The only thing keeping us from success is a little anonymous cooperation.”)

Right away, other users decided that the whole thing was a flimsy College Board ploy to catch cheaters. “Looks like we found the College Board rat,” one wrote. Another put it this way: “dinosauce313, your username is exactly how I’d imagine an out-of-touch 45-year-old … at College Board googling ‘funny internet nicknames,’ getting results from a 10-year-old Tumblr page, and thinking nothing of it.”

Students had reason to jump to that conclusion. In its 2020 AP Testing Guide, the College Board had issued a warning to students: “We will be monitoring social media and discussion sites to detect and disrupt cheating. We may post content designed to confuse and deter those who attempt to cheat.”

Before long, it was online gospel that the College Board was dinosauce313, that dinosauce313 was the College Board. By midweek, the APTests2020 subreddit had morphed into a sometimes clever, sometimes depraved online protest, a 24/7 rant about testing glitches and the College Board itself. One user posted footage of a couple having sexual intercourse. Pornographic images popped up in rainbow colors. A young woman posted a video of herself slowly pulling up her Arizona State University T-shirt (“Go Sun Devils”) and shaking her bare breasts.

Zachary Goldberg, a spokesman for the College Board, stated firmly that the organization had nothing to do with dinosauce313. “As in, we have no connection to it,” he wrote in an email.

Even so, hordes of test takers on Reddit believed otherwise. Maybe, in the middle of a trying spring, they just needed to believe it. Maybe their scorn amounted to nothing more than hormonal hijinks. Or maybe it expressed deep exhaustion with standardized tests and the entities behind them that loom so large in the lives of the young and the college-bound.

Whatever the case, l’affaire de dinosauce313 was an absurd reminder of a simple fact: The pandemic that had shut down the world didn’t halt the march of Advanced Placement exams.

The tests had to go on. That’s what the College Board decided weeks earlier.

Students wanted it that way, according to Trevor Packer, a senior vice president at the College Board who oversees the Advanced Placement program. In early April he told The Chronicle that the organization’s leaders had debated the right thing to do. Cancel the exams or not? After surveying a random sample of students, Packer said, the College Board had been “overwhelmed” by their responses: Nine out of 10 said they wanted to take the exams.

“The comments were full of emotional statements,” Packer said. “Students said, ‘So much has been taken from us — prom, senior trips. Please do not take this normalcy away.’”

At the time, Packer also said this: “Nothing is perfect in this imperfect situation.”

Those words echoed in a message Packer posted this week in a Facebook group for AP coordinators. He described how the College Board had put a premium on building a secure online system that was “impervious to cyberattacks” and attempts to flood it with malware. But that meant that the system, which, he said, had deflected dozens of online attacks, had to be “very rigid.”

“We had to prioritize secure and efficient processing over some of the flexibility that it pains me we cannot provide,” Packer wrote. “We made the choice, which you can agree or disagree with, to make sure that above all, students’ chance to test was not toppled by security incidents or breaches. And the system is performing beautifully, just as intended.”

Some test takers ruthlessly ridiculed Packer online. They jeered him, among other things, for a tweet in which he warned students not to cheat: “It’s not worth the risk of having your name reported to college admissions offices.”

In the end, the College Board’s concern about cheating apparently limited the options it could offer disgruntled test takers. As Packer wrote in his Facebook post, the organization wouldn’t check to see if students had succeeded in submitting their work. Their only option was a makeup test.

“My son had a current browser,” one mother tweeted in response to the College Board. “He was able to submit the answer to first question for Calc BC (jpeg format), but second one would not go through. Could it be your server couldn’t handle the volume of submissions at the end? Can you provide them with a backup solution to submit answers?”

Many other students and parents asked the same question: If they had time-stamped photos of their answers, couldn’t they just send them to the College Board?

“Unfortunately,” the College Board tweeted in response to the mother, “there isn’t another way to submit. We recommend reading our troubleshooting page and photo-submission guidelines to ensure he did everything correctly.”

The testing saga made Wendela Shannon angry. Her daughter, Bryn, a high-school senior in Richmond, Va., had practiced uploading images to the College Board’s system twice, just to make sure it worked. It did, both times.

But when she tried to upload her answers to the first question during the Calculus BC test the very next day, she hit several snags. After trying a few different methods, she managed to upload one page — but not the second — before time expired.

After successfully uploading her answers to the second question, she included the second page of answers to the first question, too. Maybe, she hoped, a grader would read it.

“I was unhappy,” she said. “It wasn’t really my fault.”

“These kids have gotten completely dumped on here.”

Her mother called the College Board. She waited on hold for an hour and 48 minutes before speaking to a customer-service representative who, she said, wasn’t helpful: “I feel like they did a hasty and careless job implementing this because — guess what? — they didn’t want to lose all that money from canceled exams. These kids have gotten completely dumped on here.”

After four days, students around the world had taken a total of 1.64 million AP exams, which cost $94 apiece for domestic students and $124 for those outside the United States and Canada.

Bryn Shannon, bound for the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall, decided not to take the makeup Calculus BC exam even though she had earned a 5, the top score, on the Calculus AB exam. A high score on both exams, she said, would have allowed her to bypass an entire year of calculus in college.

Still, with graduation approaching, she just wanted to move on. “They have all my answers,” she said. “They should be able to piece them together and give me the score I earned. I did it all in the time they gave me.”

During a week of technical mishaps, it was worth remembering that low-income test takers — many already contending with dated browsers and poor internet service — surely had far worse experiences than their affluent peers did. Those underserved students also weren’t as likely to have parents who would complain on Twitter or contact reporters out of the blue.”

The credibility of the College Board is at stake!

Tony

USS Theodore Roosevelt

Dear Commons Community,

Five sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt at anchor in Guam due to a COVID-19 outbreak have tested positive for the virus for the second time after reportedly recovering and have been taken off the ship, according to the Navy.

The resurgence of the virus in the five sailors on the aircraft carrier underscores the confounding  behavior of the highly contagious virus. The Associated Press reported that:

“All five sailors had previously tested positive and had gone through at least two weeks of isolation. As part of the process, they all had to test negative twice in a row, with the tests separated by at least a day or two before they were allowed to go back to the ship.

The Roosevelt has been at port in Guam since late March after the outbreak of the virus was discovered. More than 4,000 of the 4,800 crew members have gone ashore since then for quarantine or isolation. Earlier this month hundreds of sailors began returning to the ship, in coordinated waves, to get ready to set sail again.

In a statement Friday, the Navy said that, while onboard, the five sailors self-monitored and adhered to strict social distancing protocols.

“These five Sailors developed influenza-like illness symptoms and did the right thing reporting to medical for evaluation,” the Navy said, adding that they were immediately removed from the ship and put back in isolation. A small number of other sailors who were in contact with them were also taken off the ship.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said the outbreak has been a learning process.

“This is a very stubborn, infectious disease,” he told Pentagon reporters during a briefing on Friday. He said that because of the Navy’s quick action, medical crew were notified right away and determined who might have also been exposed and got them all off the ship.

As of Thursday, more than 2,900 sailors have reboarded the ship, and about 25% of the more than 1,000 who had tested positive have now recovered, according to the Navy.

One U.S. official familiar with the situation on the ship said commanders don’t know why this is happening but suggested it could be related to questions about testing accuracy. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that screening has been intensified on the ship. And, anyone who exhibits any flu-like symptoms at all is being tested and removed.

The sailors have been tested using the nasal swab. And in some cases the infection can be at such a low level that it is not detected by the test. It’s not clear whether cases like these are actual relapses, or if people tested negative without really being completely clear of the virus.”

If these five cases turn out to be relapses, this is horrendous news for stemming the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tony

Rebecca Sibilia

Dear Commons Community,

Rebecca Sibilia, Chief Executive of EdBuild, a school funding advocacy organization, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that makes a compelling case that it is time to examine the number of schools districts (more than 13,000) in this country.  Her argument is that changing school district  borders would help to get more public school money where it most needs to be, in poorer areas.  Everything she says is true, fair and rational and would go a long way to level the playing field of school funding.  As she points out, there have been some small successes in balancing school funding, however, the politics of district governance and taxing prerogatives are among the most contentious that exist in state and local politics.  Changing these boundaries are legislatively not simple and there is little interest among either Democrats or Republicans to take the issue on.   Furthermore, the federal government has very limited jurisdiction in school district governess.  And in many states, school district boundaries would involve changes to state constitutions.  Regardless, the case that Ms. Sibilia makes is a noble one, but it would probably  take a political magic wand to make it happen on a large scale.

Below is her entire op-ed.

Tony

 ——————————————————————————————-

New York Times

The Sheer Number of School Districts Is Tilting the Playing Field

By Rebecca Sibilia

May 14, 2020

If we really want to balance school budgets in the wake of the coronavirus — and create more long-term equity in our public school system — we need to come to terms with the idea that we need far fewer than the 13,000 school districts that are currently in operation in the United States.

Today, the lines that define school district borders are largely arbitrary. They’re zigzagging areas of local control, a term that conflates two separate concepts: the ability to oversee a group of neighborhood schools and the right to keep the proceeds from property wealth in narrow jurisdictions. The more exclusively these borders are drawn, the more advantage accrues to wealthy districts, each of which has an independent financial structure, at the expense of the students next door.

This structure may explain the educational geography of Camden County in southern New Jersey, which contains 35 school districts, 23 of which are within a five-mile radius of the city of Camden. Half of these districts serve fewer than 1,000 students apiece, with wide wealth disparities. The median property in Gloucester City School District is worth about $120,000, but four miles away in Haddonfield Borough a median home sells for $500,000. From this wealthy tax base, Haddonfield can raise $13,500 per student, four times higher than what can be collected in Gloucester City.

Camden County is not an anomaly. There are four times as many school districts as there are counties in the United States, over 250 of which contain more than 10 districts each. Almost two-thirds of our district borders nationwide create local revenue disparities of at least $1,000 per pupil across an invisible line between similar school systems in the same neighborhood.

This localism with regard to schools has been challenged legally many times, and state courts have repeatedly ruled that funding based on property taxes is unconstitutional. In all but a handful, they have ordered states to remedy the financial difference, but not to fix the borders that create the root inequity. So, every year, legislatures use state money to try to fill in the gaps between what low-wealth communities can raise from confined property tax areas and what they actually need to operate.

This approach has not done the job. The average predominantly nonwhite district in the United States starts with a local wealth deficit of almost $2,500 per student. State aid is so limited that on average, state legislatures are able to contribute only $260 toward closing the gap. As a result, predominantly nonwhite school districts receive a collective $23 billion less in school funding than their predominantly white counterparts, even though these districts serve the same number of students.

It is clear that this approach wasn’t working before the coronavirus hit, and the economic fallout from the pandemic will demonstrate exactly how flawed this system is. Sales, energy and income taxes are plummeting, and these are the receipts that states use to close the property tax gap across school district borders. Without intervention, we will soon watch education budgets for middle- and lower-income communities unravel.

But if we envision a new map of property taxation for schools — one in which district borders no longer define “local” for the purposes of education dollars, we can tap into funding that is already in the system and offset this challenge. Because larger borders encompass more communities, they can smooth out the major differences in neighborhood wealth that we see across the country.

If a typical U.S. county like Berrien County, Mich., were to combine all of its local taxes into one pool instead of independent collection among 15 different school districts, we could flatten the tax disparity between the highest local tax district at $25,000 per student, and the lowest-wealth district in the same county that generates just $750. According to analysis for an upcoming EdBuild report, sharing taxes across Berrien County would increase funding for 79 percent of all students (and 87 percent of low-income children). If we adopted this plan, the lowest income areas could withstand a state-funding reduction of upward of $3,332 in the next year without seeing an overall decline in available resources.

We know that these kinds of state cuts are coming but pooling the wealth that already exists in the community means that we can buffer the impact for the majority of children in Berrien County, and those nationwide. This solution isn’t unique to Michigan. State after state turn in positive results under this model. County pooling around Fayetteville, Ark., would deliver more money to 84 percent of low-income students. In the Kansas City suburbs, more than three-quarters of all students would benefit. In Johnstown, Pa., 86 percent of nonwhite students could gain access to the money that is already in their neighborhood. And back in Camden, 69 percent of low-income students would benefit from this change.

Reimagining school-funding geography would bring two distinct benefits. In the short term, we could find the money to buffer the impact of impending state cuts. On a longer-term basis, we could start to truly balance cross-border funding inequities and take on the racial and socioeconomic segregation that these borders enable and protect.

By expanding the definition of “local” just a bit, without finding any new state revenue or increasing any local tax rates, we can immediately get more money to a significant majority of all children. Under this kind of new nationwide map, 69 percent of all of the country’s children — and 73 percent of minority and 76 percent of low-income students — would get access to about $1,000 more in local property tax funding.

This money is not insignificant. It would enable distance learning by covering the cost of a Chromebook and home internet access for every student who stands to gain funding. Alternately, the average district could use this new money to hire five mental health counselors and five remedial education coaches for every school in the district. In essence, we can find the money that districts currently and urgently need to address the impact of the pandemic within our own education budgets. The money is already there.

The borders that determine the jurisdiction of local school taxes are not ordained by nature. We draw them, and we can change them whenever we decide. The coronavirus era is a good time for us to think more broadly about school district geographies — in terms of funding, but also how we define schools, taxes and community.

Some of us may see this financial proposal as a quiet first step toward income and race-based integration. Others will see it merely as an urgent financial fix. Either way, this proposal won’t lead to an immediate overhaul that satisfies either group fully, nor will it solve all of our education problems. There are so many challenges to overcome to achieve an equally accessible future for all of our children. But if we take the first step of broadening the definition of local in order to pool money more equitably, we may be able to look back at all the good that came from that redefinition — and see the enormous step forward that this was.