The Aberdeen School District e-mailed all K-12 parents Tuesday night to announce our plan for school this fall. We’re not requiring masks. We may alternate recess times to minimize the number of kids out in the fresh air at the same time, but the plan indicates no changes in the daily schedule (like separate morning and afternoon cohorts, or the 4–10 plan) to reduce crowding and contact indoors, where kids spend most of the school day. The Aberdeen School District plans to keep K-8 students in small cohort groups and avoid mixing as much as possible, but rather than adopting a safer hybrid or fully online model right off the bat, we’re going to head right back to the traditional face-to-face plan on August 18. We’ll just use tape and signs to remind kids “to always stay 6 feet apart in lines…” which means a lunch line of 400 kids will be over half a mile long.
My blog reaction is, We’re hosed.
My dad reaction is, My daughter’s hosed.
Now if things go to heck, Aberdeen says, like Sioux Falls and pretty much every other school is saying, that they have hybrid and online back-up plans. Aberdeen’s plan doesn’t give any specifics on what specific conditions must arise to make the district resort to an alternative schedule or mode of delivery; amidst the hydra of appendices, one flow chart suggests that such changes are almost literally the last thing the district will consider, and only if there are “substantial cases”—not defined, but plural, for Pete’s sake, plural!—in the school building, and even then, only consider.
This plan lists no specific conditions that will trigger a school closing. This plan says nothing about external public health metrics—for instance, number and 14-day trend of cases and hospitalizations among the general public—that would precipitate a change to school-wide or district-wide online learning from home or a return from such isolation to modified in-person classes. This plan offers nothing to help parents who make their family health decisions based on data to determine where the school will draw its red lines of action and whether those red lines are being drawn at the right places.
So what if, instead of waiting to see how many of our kids will have to get coronavirus before the school considers adjusting its schedule, some of us parents would prefer to bring our kids back to school in a viable learning environment with the least risk of pandemic spread—i.e., our homes, in front of the computers again—and see if eight weeks of everyone in America wearing a mask really can get coronavirus under control?
Aberdeen acknowledges that possibility and gives us until July 31 to fill out this contract to have our kids take classes via Edgenuity, a private company that claimed last year to sell digital curriculum to thousands of schools reaching more than six million students across the country. Students choosing this option will apparently only have access to classes in the “core content areas.” Their families have to provide Internet access and probably their own computers (“a limited number of computers may be available for check-out”).
I’m chewing hard over this line under the Edgenuity online plan: “District staff members will make direct contact with students two times per week, to identify assignments, monitor progress, and submit final grades for report cards/transcripts.” I’m not seeing anything in that line about district staff actually teaching those online courses. It suggests that local teachers—or the principal, or the guidance counselor, or the school secretary, or other staffers—appear to serve only an administrative role for the online kids, touching base twice a week to make sure they aren’t slacking off.
It appears that if we choose the safer online option for August 18, the school is saying our kids don’t get the same education as Aberdeen kids whose parents gamble on the district’s face-to-face plan. We get a subset of core classes, and not classes from our own school, but lessons prepared and taught by… well… who knows who, from who knows where?
And as a kicker, families who say they want their kids to learn online have to lock in for a full nine-week term. If we get four weeks in and find this outsourced curriculum stinks, or if the coronavirus risk recedes and we feel comfortable sending our kids back to the regular classroom, we don’t get to do so; we’re stuck in all-online classes until term’s end. The plan does not make clear whether individual students can jump from face-to-face Aberdeen classes at the four-week mark into the all-online option, but I’ll bet, for administrative purposes, that door doesn’t swing either way until the next quarter begins.
I know—choices have consequences.
Furthermore, I know that, in asking Aberdeen to make the same curriculum from the same teachers, the teachers I know, available throughout the year online as in the classroom, I may be asking too much of our professional educators. Our teachers already have to come up with three alternative delivery methods for all of their courses and be ready to deploy any one of those alternatives at any point throughout the entire school year. But at least they get to assume that all of their students will be in the same boat. Allowing students to switch whenever they or their parents want during each term would require the teacher to execute face-to-face and online lesson plans simultaneously. That’s just too much to dump on teachers who are already doing twice the work for no extra pay.
But absent a shutdown, teachers will already face that situation of a constantly changing mix of kids coming to the classroom and kids learning from home. Under the district’s own guidelines for self-screening, parents are to keep their kids home if they show any symptom of coronavirus or have been in close contact with anyone confirmed to have covid-19. So if we all play by the rules, no one will come to school with a cough (interesting: sneezing and runny nose aren’t included on the no-go list), headache, sore throat or unexplained muscle pain. That should mean that on any given day, a quarter of kids who didn’t choose the Edgenuity path for the quarter will nonetheless be absent and learning from home.
And just wait until a teacher shows a symptom or two. Where will we find substitute teachers who can not only handle onsite crowd control but also deliver content and field incoming messages from kids on the roster who are staying home with symptoms?
Students and teachers are going to be shifting gears so often just from increased absences that the Aberdeen schools may not be gaining any real operational advantage by segregating the more cautious families into separate and probably not equal Edgenuity classes. Aberdeen might well find it more efficient, not to mention more educationally equitable and sound and more responsive to public health concerns, to put all students on the same track by adopting the hybrid Plan B or fully remote Plan C for everyone right now.
The hybrid model might be the smartest, most robust starting point. Meet in class two days a week. To cut class sizes in half, half the kids come Monday and Thursday morning, 7 a.m. to noon; half the kids come Monday and Thursday afternoon, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. We scrub the building like crazy over the noon hour while we distribute box- or bag-lunches at separate locations (preferably outside) to the departing morning cohort and the arriving afternoon cohort. Teachers and students do class online the rest of the week. Teachers learn to design their lessons to schedule the learning activities that work best with independent study (reading, research, writing…) during the online days and to focus the two in-class days on the learning activities that work best when we are all together in the classroom (science labs, group coaching, group discussions…).
And forget Edgenuity: instead of sending that money out of state (Edgenuity is based in Arizona), spend that money and our CARES Act aid on hiring more local teachers to help design and deliver our own curriculum and reduce class sizes.
If we start with the hybrid model, teachers and students get to make face-to-face contact from the start to build the necessary personal relationship. Those twice-weekly meetings provide vital personal support to help teachers and students get used to interacting productively the rest of the week online. We also reduce the number of families who will choose the exclusively online model, as the hybrid model (especially with the split shifts and reduced class sizes!) will land on the go side of more parents’ red lines. If coronavirus surges, it will be easier to transition to a district-wide fully online model; if coronavirus wanes, it will be easier to transition to a full-time in-class schedule.
And if we start hybrid on split shifts, fewer kids and teachers will get sick and die.
We have no really great options for getting our kids back in the educational swing this fall. My wife and I are still discussing which of the options offered we find acceptable. But I have grave concerns that the Aberdeen School District is not doing enough to protect our daughter’s health and the integrity of her educational experience.
To better address these concerns, the Aberdeen School District should avoid tracking cautious students into a separate, inflexible, and likely inferior online track. It should instead adopt hybrid Plan B now and focus on offering an equal and safer education to all students.
Sharpen the pitchforks. Prepare to run the superintendent and school board out of town.
It’s likely we’ll have a long, miserable fall 2020 and early winter 2021 – having learned next to nothing from OUR experience during the Spanish Flu. Obviously, this US history and hygiene is not taught in our schools.
Ridiculous and shameful. Total lack of concern for kids and the community.
All schools, considering their opening plans, have the same ways that they are running into. First, over a century of industrial, efficiency, cram-them-in, thinking has made reacting to a pandemic more difficult (if not impossible). Classrooms that are filled with 23-30 students would need to reduce their populations by 2/3 to have any legitimate social distancing. Our schools have neither the real estate, the classroom space, not the staffing to do that. Second, schools are the largest provider of child care. Parents want/need to have safe supervision for their children for 8-4 Monday-Friday, and our public schools system is meeting that need. That also means that split schedules or part-time on campus solutions come into conflict with full-time child care.
Our nation demands that schools have to go back to “normal” because parents need to get back to work as “normal” because the economy needs to get back to “normal.” I have posted before that the US is not a society; it is a business. Acceptable losses is business thinking; that philosophy is driving pandemic responses. There is also some historic basis for this, think how cavalier we are about 47,000 flue deaths annually. We accept that as background noise — as the “cost of doing business.”
Schools also know that ALL decisions that inconvenience families will affect our economically disadvantaged, high-need, and children of color the most.
O rightly points out the two big systemic barriers to implementing strong pandemic-prevention protocols: our long-standing industrial model of mass education and the assumptions we have built into our economy that both parents can go work while someone else (schools, daycares) mind our kids in a warehouse setting. After four straight months of seeing what works in pandemic control and what doesn’t, and after four straight months of seeing harshly refuted every prediction that the virus would go away, we still aren’t willing to fundamentally change our way of doing business—business, as O emphasizes.
I recognize that to go fully online or even adopt the hybrid model for the school year, my household would likely have to go from 2 FTE employment to 1.5, if not 1.0, to ensure that we could provide the necessary support to our child’s education. We’re still considering our options.
Staggering students, as in half come on M-W and the other half T-Th, doesn’t do anything to protect the teachers. They still have to come in M-Th to teach half the class(es).
There is no perfect plan; that we know for sure. If you read the details on masks, you will see that at least they are requiring them in various situations, which could end up being most of the day, depending on the learning activities. That’s more than MANY other schools are doing.
Even NSU says masks are optional. Many faculty are in high risk categories, so even if they choose to wear masks to protect the students, the students don’t need to return the favor.
Axios’ Kim Hart and Marisa Fernandez have written about schools opening in the fall.
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My thought? If children don’t keep up with where they would be in a normal year, so what? They’ll be okay. The roof will not fall in and adjustments can be made because they and the school personnel will be alive and healthy to make them.
The concept that all students must not trail one data byt from where they would be in a normal year is false. This is not a normal year. We need to remember that and do our best, understanding that the outcome won’t be the same. That’s reasonable. We will all be okay. *Life* will go on.
J, I recognize that any amount of coming to school increases the risk to every party involved. But a hybrid plan with split shifts still reduces risk for everyone, students and teachers.
First, to be clear, I propose two days of instruction, each with two shifts. Monday and Thursday morning, five hours, all kids last names A–M (that last method of division isn’t essential; I’m just illustrating the halfsies). Monday and Thursday afternoon, five hours, all kids last names N–Z.
Now I would be absolutely thrilled to split the teachers by shifts as well: have one cohort of teachers who only work the morning shift, then bring in a whole separate cohort of teachers for the afternoon shift. I would love to hire another 380 teachers with the state’s freshly announced $19M surplus to help provide that staffing. Less time in school for each group of teaches, with exposure to fewer kids, would significantly reduce their risk and make it easier to control any outbreak.
That said, suppose the school district finds it just can’t hire any extra teachers. The hybrid split shift would still reduce risk.
Think of it with some really simplified math with some completely fabricated numbers:
Suppose you have a 1 in 5000 chance (0.02%) of catching coronavirus in one face-to-face interaction with one person.
Under Plan A, face-to-face schooling, normal schedule, one teacher will encounter 120 people each day, for 5 days a week. That’s 600 rolls of the dice. The teacher has an 88.7% chance of not getting coronavirus from any of those 600 encounters in one week… or an 11.3% chance of getting sick.
Under Plan B, each teacher still encounters the same number of people, 120, in a school day, but for only two days each week. That reduces the weekly risk to 4.7%.
Under Plan B’ that J gets me to contemplate, where we hire separate teacher cohorts for the morning and afternoon shifts, we cut the daily interactions in half, to 60, and we cut the weekly risk to 2.4%.
Under Plan C, where we do all teaching and learning online, if the teacher stays home most of the time and has just 3 interactions all week (maybe a meeting with the principal and a couple gals from IT), the teacher’s weekly risk of getting coronavirus drops to 0.06%.
I know, Grudz, there are a zillion other factors we’d have to consider to come up with reliable measures of epidemiological risk. But the point I’m making is that we have to think statistically. No school plan guarantees no one will get sick. But reducing interactions will reduce every participant’s chances of getting sick. Hybrid Plan B will reduce everyone’s risk. Remote Plan C will reduce everyone’s risk further.
Mitchell is requiring everyone in the building to wear a mask. No plan is perfect, but some plans are a darn sight better than others.
Cory, to demonstrate the devil-is-in-the-details nature of planning, I ask a few questions about your split schedule: 1) will you run busses for each session – therefore full routs in the morning and full routes in the afternoon (did you give enough time to finish the early home drop-off and complete the later school pick ups)? 2) Will breakfasts still be provided (and lunches to our bus kids) and will extra lunches (and breakfasts) be distributed for the days not in session? 3) Will after school extracurriculars and enrichments be available still (to both groups)?
Then the A-bomb question: what do parents do with their children when parents are at work and their children are not being supervised at school?
Sorry to hear that Cory.
1/3 of children tested have Covid19. So stop testing them is the answer to controlling the pandemic.
“Nearly one-third of children who have been tested for the coronavirus in Florida have tested positive, according to data from the state’s Department of Health that comes amid ongoing debate and uncertainty over whether schools will reopen this fall.
Of the 54,022 people under the age of 18 who have been tested for COVID-19 in Florida, 16,797 of them, or roughly 31%, have tested positive, data released Friday shows. In comparison, roughly 11% of everyone in the state who has been tested for the virus — roughly 2.8 million people — has tested positive.”
This school thingy will not end well for South Dakota. Get ready for some small caskets.
So children are carriers. They’ll infect their families, elders will die, parents become seriously ill, perhaps developing lifelong disabilities.
Medical Moron has created a real dystopia right here right now.
It’s really a pity the Strib is paywalled, though I understand the economic necessity. There are two op ed pieces today that are highly critical of Education Idiot’s demand that schools open.
Bryan LeGrand is a Minneapolis high school teacher and he is passionate. This is the closing of his descriptive piece:
“The demand that teachers return to work in an unsafe environment has, thus far, ignored what medical professionals do when they get home at the end of the day: self-isolate from their families so as not to risk infecting them. Given the asymptomatic spread of COVID-19, it would be unethical for me to have physical contact, or even physical proximity, to my loved ones for the duration of the school year or the duration of the pandemic. When people casually note that teachers might get sick or get the people they care about sick, they are ignoring the immorality of the act of putting others at risk. It would be immoral for me, if I must return to the classroom, to do anything that might jeopardize the health of others, including the people I love. That means I would have to cut myself off from the people I care for entirely. Otherwise, there is the very real possibility I might kill them.
“At the end of it all, reopening schools in the fall is folly — deadly folly. I am not dying for Donald. And I am damn sure not going to let Donald kill the people I love.”
Here is the summation of another piece, this one advocating a safe return to school. The author, Annie M. Kopplin, a married attorney and mother of 3, is focused on gender equity.
(Jerry, some of this will sound familiar to you.)
“For instance, what about hiring teachers’ aides to fill in for what will inevitably be a shortage of in-person teachers? Can we allow teachers to opt-in to online or in-person learning and provide a similar option for students? Can we make use of empty stadiums, arenas, office buildings, etc., to spread kids out? Maybe we spread out elementary schools among current elementary and high schools and shift high schools online?
“We are dealing with a novel virus that has created novel problems, one after another, in health care, education, travel and so many more industries worldwide. Rather than being continuously surprised at the situation we find ourselves in and tied to foolhardy partisan plays based on what yard signs we agree with, let’s come at a truly unprecedented situation with novel and unprecedented solutions. Let’s get kids back in school. Let’s keep women employed. And, as a side benefit, let’s slow the panic and eroding mental health of mothers (and fathers) everywhere.”
The WH won’t tell us if Mother Pence plans to return to school to teach next month. Why wouldn’t you, Mother? We’re told it’s perfectly safe and it’s for the good of the GOP! Er, I meant, nation.
Hey Cory Does Rep. Dusty have kids and are they headin’ to school?
I found this quite interesting and not at all surprising….
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/507952-texas-exempts-religious-private-schools-from-reopening-guidelines
Violating the constitution to give religious schools public funds is okay. Making them toe the health and educational guidelines is unconstitutional, in Texass.
All schools must open except not all of them.
O’s A-bomb question probably kills any discussion of an alternative schedule… although I have to wonder why. Governor Kristi Noem herself was willing to send all the kids home full-time when coronavirus first hit. What research has come out in the last four months that shows gathering kids and teachers in schools in the fall is any safer than it was in March?
Aberdeen has called school off completely and forced parents to arrange daycare multiple times for snowstorms that never materialized, for snow days on which the roads offered normal driving conditions. It is snowing hard right now: there is more danger to children and adults than on those days when Superintendent Guffin looked at tomorrow’s weather report and made the call at 6 p.m. to call off tomorrow’s school because Phil Schreck said it might snow.
I don’t have a good practical answer for how parents provide daycare under the hybrid plan or the remote learning plan. I can only say kids are more likely to be harmed by sending them to school under a normal schedule than they are by keeping them home and then turn to parents and say, “Well, which is it: your kids health or your job?”
Yes, this is an unpleasant time, filled with unpleasant choices with unpleasant consequences.
The problem with the A-bomb question is that the school can’t make a complete plan to deal with the consequences of its choices. The school district doesn’t have the money or staff to provide safe supervision for all children while their parents work full-time jobs. The school district can’t enact legislation to mandate that all employers allow workers to split their shifts or work remotely so that one working parent can be home at all times with children. The school district can’t extend federal coronavirus relief checks to allow some parents to quit their jobs and still feed the kids. The school district can’t organize, equip with super wi-fi, and subsidize home-mini-classrooms across the district, run by the one parent in five who is not in the workforce, who can stay home all day, and thus who could have a regular cohort of five children from the neighborhood who would come over every day from 8 to 3 to learn together, have lunch, and stay out of trouble until their own parents get home.
Actually, think about that last plan: send teachers out three days a week, after morning health screening, fully masked, to visit each of those home mini-classrooms for an hour to deliver lessons and give the HMC parents some support… or just a long smoke break in the yard.
Extracurriculars and enrichments would not be as big of a complication if we could just have two sets of practice times, after each shift, coached by separate coaching staffs—e.g., teachers from first shift host extra activities from noon to 1, while teachers from second shift host those activities from 5 to 6… or maybe those activities gather to practice once or twice a week on the days when we don’t have school.
To make it work, we might have to have two sets of buses and bus drivers, too. Yeah, that’s a mess… so maybe we just need to live with Plan C, do it all online. And instead of running regular food service, with kids dining en masse at school or providing prepared meals that kids and parents can pick up every day, we send the buses out once a week with care packages, groceries to provide the equivalent of a week’s worth of breakfasts and lunches for each child in the district.
Yes, Old Spec 5, Rep. Johnson has kids. They attend school in Mitchell, where, if they are in the public school, they will be required to wear masks.