The Sioux Falls School District plans to return to traditional, face-to-face instruction on August 27. The Return to Learn Plan under review at this evening’s school board meeting offers a lot of pillars and pictures, but it boils down to these practical steps:
- The district is preparing for face-to-face, hybrid, and remote learning.
- The district is creating a “Virtual Academy” “as an option for students who have concerns about returning to school this fall.”
- The district will train teachers on its digital platforms (SeeSaw for grade 5 and under, Schoology for middle school, Google Classroom for high school), the Remind communication tool, Screencastify, effective delivery of online lessons, and effective use of Google Tools and Google Meet.
- All staff are “encouraged” to wear masks. The district will not supply masks to back that “encouragement.”
- Some staff are required to wear masks: cleaning staff, public-facing staff who don’t have plexiglass partitions, staff who go into homes, staff who work within six feet of a student for 15 continuous minutes or more, staff caring for students and staff who show symptoms of coronavirus, and custodial staff cleaning up areas where symptomatic folks have been. The district will supply those required masks and other personal protective equipment.
SFSD Covid-19 PPE Guidance, screen capped 2020.07.13. - Food service staff will wear face coverings, gloves, aprons, and hair restraints.
- Transportation staff will wear masks.
- Students are “strongly encouraged” to wear masks.
- Students will get pre-wrapped utensils, pre-packaged condiments, and pre-wrapped self-serve items
- Parents must complete a daily health check before sending their kids to school. The school won’t be enforcing this check or requiring submission of the worksheet:
SFSD daily student health checklist for coronavirus risk, screen capped 2020.07.13. - Only teachers are to open or close classroom doors, to minimize common touch points.
- All staff will be responsible for routinely wiping down frequently touched surfaces in their work area (meaning one more thing for teachers to do instead of just teaching).
- Student desks will be turned to face the same direction; in classrooms with tables, students will sit on one side only to avoid facing each other.
- Teachers will limit the sharing of books and other learning tools in the classroom.
So in addition to providing their own masks, working as disease control specialists, and being locked into the least-learning friendly arrangement of desks and materials in the classroom, teachers will be expected to prepare to switch from face-to-face to hybrid to online learning throughout the school year and possibly maintain a constant second stream of instruction for the virtual academy. Thanks to our inability to swiftly control the coronavirus pandemic, Sioux Falls teachers will be doing twice as much work to teach this year, and doing so in riskier circumstances.
There are nothing but rocks and hard places here.
If education is delivered completely virtually, or even hybridized, it creates an immense burden on parents, and dramatically impacts those who are economically disadvantaged and least likely to be able to work from home.
How do you balance the risk to students, teachers, and families while still serving the educational needs of students (and often the nutritional needs, for as many as 40% of students get their best / only meal at school) and the economic realities of families?
If you have better ideas, make them known.
Hire more teachers for smaller class sizes. As far as feeding kids, food trucks can take that up right quick like. A good full service, self contained food truck pull behind, will run about 30-35,000.00, that truck could work right out of a commissary to get the food delivered to the classrooms allocated. There will be two meals provided to each student along with fruit snacks in the afternoon or as needed.
Use storefronts like the abandoned mall sites for class rooms. They are already inspected electrically and have bathrooms that are handicap accessible. Students can be placed on fold up tables and chairs that can be purchased at many outlets close to the buildings. These tables can accommodate two students each. Electrical outlets for the computers can be installed overhead.
Hire more custodians and dedicated staff that disinfects the classrooms including anything that could possible be touched. Hire dedicated nurses and assistants to take temperatures and to monitor the students as well as the teachers health daily.
Recess would still take place in a sectioned off area outside of the building under hired supervision.
The rest of the details can be added as needed. Plexiglas barriers will be in place to separate the students at their tables along with masks.
The South Dakota GOP legislature will surely dismiss any attempts by the few Democrats to compensate the state’s teachers accordingly. Notice, for instance, the resistance to paying the pay-grade scale installed recently by the legislature. Give great heed to reducing taxes on the richer, but don’t get too concerned over those front-line people like teachers, first-aid and health providers, police and fire-fighters and lower wage earners. ABOVE ALL don’t tax according to means (income tax or stock market profits)—the GOP mantra.
I don’t think Sweet-o Burrito every day for lunch is going to satisfy the USDOE meal requirements. grudznick’s maybe, but not USDOE’s or the lunch ladies’.
Mr. grudznick, of course you’re a bit jaded as you think taters and gravy are health foods. Rest assured that you can get a very good nutritious meal from a food truck. They have grills in them, they can be set up the way you want them. Customized for what you want to serve.
The meals can also be prepared in a commissary commercial kitchen and then bought out to the sites for final preparations. https://www.self.com/gallery/healthy-food-trucks-exist-theyre-delicious-slideshow
We are in a disaster, no different that if a tornado would bear down on us or an attack from zombies. Why make it harder than it needs to be? This is really basic simple stuff that probably is in an old Cold War handbook. Ask those loonies in Edgemont at the old Igloo site.
I would certainly like to visit the food trucks at the igloos, Mr. jerry, and test out your ideas.
As to teachers having to work a little harder for the sales tax from all of us but only for their raises, that’s a good thing. Maybe we can get a few more teachers higher on the SILT scale.
Mr. grudznick, as they fear dark meat, the menu there is limited to only the right wing of the chicken.
The fact that Noem has failed badly means teachers will take on a much tougher job. I like that they are preparing for all contingencies, and giving parents choice, but this is really a public health issue. I’ve heard it’s best to pod face-to-face teaching with no interaction between pods. Rural districts are going to show how they can provide a better education in these circumstances.
Question for Cory or debate coaches: are debaters not going to summer debate camps? How are they preparing for the debate season? Will there be a debate season, and under what conditions?
Same for music, drama departments?
Mr. Pay, I suspect that topic is a subject of some debate within many school districts and the SDHAA.
Mr. jerry, you could be right about those fellows down in the igloos, and you might also have said, but you did not say, nor did Mr. Evans:
I have heard tell those fellows do like stuffing and the offal meats down there, dry and without gravy, so I don’t think they fear the dark meats much, but they certainly seem to be gravy heathens.
The truth is, in order to keep children 6 feet apart instead of crammed 2 feet apart as they currently are, we would need to have double the number of classrooms to fit them all in. You can’t put same children in the same classroom and have them socially distanced. So, who’s going to pay for more classrooms? Or are we going to run classes 24/7, and who’s going to teach the midnight shift? How do you make this work? The answer: you don’t, not without money, and there is no money. As someone else said, wherever they do make it mandatory for all children to attend in person schools, I give the rabid science experiment six weeks, tops, before the infections spike and parents keep their kids home.
Maybe somebody at the magic money factory in D.C. could get some unlimited money for the schools to build new buildings or put up tents. But there better be transparency that the money goes for the tents, not to pay the fat cat administrators even more fat money.
Los Angeles will not have school in person but will teach remotely. That is one big ol’ school district as well. Several other California cities will also do the same. We have plenty of money to do whatever we want to do so the idea that deficits matter means nothing. Spend the money to protect, cut back on the bloat of military spending. Those guys and gals are sick with the Covid, don’t make our kids as sick as they are.
Supt. Stavem says the coronavirus adaptations will cost the district $7.8 million. That’s the price of Trump’s demand to hold school safely in what he thinks are normal conditions… yet he would cut funding for schools who choose other models for safety’s sake.
Wayne, the burden on parents is a key sticking point. Once again, to make home-based education work, we need to restructure the economy so that families can get by on a single income…
…or maybe just extend those coronavirus relief checks to pay at least one parent to stay home and handle supporting the kids’ education.
There’s no way these hybrid plans can work without more teachers. How is a teacher going to teach her present class, while also teaching her virtual class? They will have different questions and different issues.
The fact that the school does not insist on masks and provide necessary PPE to every employee of any level is reprehensible.
As others have said, parents are put in impossible positions as well.
Jerry’s plan is doable. All SD has to do is institute an income tax. Since it’s the legal residence of the Congressional delegation and all those RVers, a good, progressive tax would probably cover the expenses.
Of course, enacting such a tax would require the SDGOP to care more about the state’s children than their own comfort and $$$$. Thus far in the 21st century, they don’t.
Debbo, how can you possibly infer that the SDGOP cares little about our state’s children. Our elected officials swear to provide for the best our citizens. Oh, I forgot, our schoolchildren cannot vote!
Debbo, an income tax is not a panacea. Nor is it likely to aid much during a recession when people are losing their jobs and those that still have them are facing higher grocery bills and other financial strains. We’ve seen other states are in worse shape for education funding since they relied heavily on sales / income taxes to fund their education systems. With those drying up, it’s a worse situation than what we’re seeing.
South Dakota ranks 10th in the nation for it’s GINI index (a measure of income inequality); the differential between the highest and lowest earners in South Dakota isn’t that wide, meaning there aren’t a ton of high income folks around to tax as the mythical pot of gold.
If we used North Dakota as a surrogate for a cognitive exercise, we could do some back of the envelope work. ND collects about $465 per person in income tax. SD has about 850,000 people. That gives us about $395 million to spread over 684 Schools (152 Districts), or about $578,000 per school / $2.6mm per district.
At the same time, you’re taking $395mm out of the paychecks of South Dakotans at a time when they need it most.
Counties are already jacking up real estate taxes through assessments. Ours shot up 15% this year, on top of a steady 5% increase over the past five years. Plus the school district finally got their opt out, so there’s additional bond payments on our tax bill. So in six years our tax burden increased by nearly 50%.
Sources:
https://taxfoundation.org/state/north-dakota/
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/school-district-totals-average-enrollment-statistics-for-states-metro-areas.html
Wayne’s comment about income tax is based on an incorrect premise, at least as it relates to a progressive income tax. By suggesting that an income tax will be taking money out of a paycheck when people “need it most” conflates income tax with sales tax and property taxes.
The amount of tax assessed under a progressive income tax is calculated on income so if someone’s income drops because the virus causes unemployment, their income tax burden, by definition, either drops or is eliminated. In contrast property owners are still assessed the same amount of property tax regardless of loss of income. Likewise our state’s sales tax applies to the food and other necessary items for survival regardless of our income.
By definition a progressive income is designed to only take money in taxes that people can afford to pay due to their actual income, which necessarily means they will be left with more money to meet their needs than under a sales tax or a property tax.
One may philosophically oppose incomes taxes, but doing so based on an incorrect understanding about how a progressive income tax functions when income is reduced compared to sales tax, property tax, or other taxes that do not change despite loss of income seems illogical.
BCB, thanks for the clarity.
Wayne, depends on how much they tax. I’d suggest adding a tax on the trust havens and other gratuitous goodies for the wealthy that the state provides. SD should be able to do so at a rate that will benefit SD while keeping the cheapskates here. (Disappointing that SD wants that.)
The main policy point is that we’re taking teachers and kids away from each other when they need each other most. We have to solve that. We certainly can’t suspend education because there’s no vaccine and because no one wants to pay more taxers or can pay more taxes. Enter deficit spending… and some big wealth, trust, and capital gains taxes to redistribute wealth when we need that redistribution most to preserve civil society and the equal opportunity kids get from continuous effective public education.
We could also probably get a lot more juice out of the trillions in emergency spending we’ve already authorized by getting Trump off his butt (or just out of the way) and implementing the real watchdoggery Congress intended to accompany its coronavirus relief but which the pathological Executive Branch has inexplicably sandbagged. (Wait, I can explain it: the Trump Administration is all incompetence and corruption.)