Schools have been back in Australia for months now, and they have just been honest from the start - that social distancing is not practical in schools. Teachers and parents were thrilled by this, of course. So they have acknowledged that if one kid in a class gets it, others might too, and they have focussed as much as possible on practices that would stop it at one class or year level rather than allowing it to spread through the school. Masks are neither encouraged nor discouraged in schools in my state (they are now encouraged in other environments ‘when social distancing is not possible’).
In my state, which is equivalent to about Arizona in population, there is a small amount of community spread now. Most weeks have between 70-120 new cases (this is about six in every ten thousand tests coming back positive so we are testing widely to find these cases).
Schools have banned multi-grade activities, assemblies etc and kids only do things with their own class (primary school) or grade (high school). Interschool sport is off for public schools and interschool activities like debating have been taken online.
Primary school kids are encouraged to mix only with their class friends at lunchtime, and to sit with those friends in class, so they are being encouraged into bubbles within their classrooms. Desks are not spaced out - there is no room. Instead they are clustered into those bubbles and space is left between the bubbles. Classroom doors and windows remain wide open all the time to promote air flow. This makes the classrooms a bit cold in winter but we have a mild climate so it is possible here. It will be unpleasant in the heat of summer though! Many/most of our primary schools (all but the oldest) are designed for cross-flow of air to keep them cool without air conditioning, so you enter a classroom directly from the playground and we do not have too many hallways to worry about.
Lunch etc is in classrooms on rainy days (uncommon), and outdoors at all other times. (This is normal for us). At the high school it is outdoors on rainy days too. We don’t have school cafeterias here the way you do in the US - kids bring lunch from home, or pre-order it from the canteen and pick it up like it is take-out.
Sanitiser is everywhere. In classrooms. In dispensers mounted around the school. Many primary school classrooms have sinks, and teachers enforce hand washing.
Teachers are supposed to socially distance from each other at all times.
High schools have staggered class times to minimise crowding between classes. This took a bit of getting accustomed to, so the return to school was staggered - a couple of grades at a time. Some busy hallways have been made one way. Many of our high schools are also fairly open plan so hallways are not a huge issue.
The primary school has a staggered finishing time to prevent parents congregating outside the school (no parents are allowed on school grounds at the moment). At both primary and high schools, each class or grade enters and exits the school by a specific gate at a specific time to prevent crowding at the gates.
When a kid tests positive, the school is closed immediately. Usually for the remainder of that day and one full additional day. During that time contact tracing is done, all their close contacts get tested. Test turnaround under those circumstances is less than 24 hours. If another kid tests positive in that first day, they assume it may have spread at school and the school closes for two weeks. If there are no further positives that first day, the close contacts continue to quarantine for two weeks but everyone else goes back to school. The vast majority of the time, the kid caught it from a parent, the school is just closed for one day and nobody else catches covid.
My state’s biggest school cluster so far has 22 people in it so far, although I think half of those are family members, and it is only a week old. All of the first few cases actually caught it at a weekend overnight prayer retreat not associated with the school (these have now been banned), but the students had a chance to spread it at school before it was detected.
We have one state in the country where there is a lot more community spread than there is here. Once about one in a hundred tests were coming back positive, they closed schools again. Because, and I know none of you want to hear this - spread in schools is low and controllable when spread in the community is low and controllable. Spread in primary schools seems to remain low. But we discovered the hard way that when community transmission is high, high schools are not magically excluded, and (even with masks compulsory) it will spread in schools as easily as it will in offices or among retail workers. Not as fast as it does in bars, restaurants or churches or nursing homes. But fast enough.
