Modeling School Reopening Options in Response to COVID-19

Authors

  • Nikhil Shanbhag Archbishop Mitty High School
  • Anthony Grabowski Kehillah Jewish High School

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v10i1.1282

Keywords:

Modeling, School Reopening, COVID-19

Abstract

School administrators have the daunting challenge of rolling out school reopening policies and safety standards. While it is important to have children in school to maximize learning, it is critical to ensure that it is done in a manner which prioritizes the safety of staff and students on campus. This research explores models that can be used to examine the spread of COVID-19, and then applies them to evaluate school reopening policies within the United States. A variety of factors are accounted for, including the student population, the rate at which students are infected, the rate at which students are quarantined, and the proportion of students that are susceptible to COVID-19. We primarily utilize Euler’s method and nondimensionalization of the differential equations for each model. Our graphical results are displayed using Excel. We show that multiple variables such as rate of infection and recovery can be written solely as a function of one parameter: R0. We first analyze the SIR model and then introduce the new scenario of quarantining students to derive the SIQR model. Our findings show that reducing and maintaining R0 below 1 is the key to reopening schools and we outline practices to help achieve this outcome.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Anthony Grabowski, Kehillah Jewish High School

Mr. Grabowski is a Physics and Math teacher at Kehillah Jewish High School. He mentored Nikhil for this reasearch project.

Published

03-31-2021

How to Cite

Shanbhag, N., & Grabowski, A. (2021). Modeling School Reopening Options in Response to COVID-19 . Journal of Student Research, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.47611/jsrhs.v10i1.1282

Issue

Section

HS Research Articles