The question across the country has been one of endless mental and emotional gymnastics: What does a safe and sane school reopening look like these days as the coronavirus pandemic known as COVID-19 continues?
As the Aug. 27 start date approaches, Chaffee County and Buena Vista School District (BVSD) appear to be a relative oasis in the pandemic and the response to it.
“We know there have been many changes in plans for reopening across the state,” said Superintendent Lisa Yates. “One of our commitments early on as a district leadership was to achieve ‘every student, every day,’ which guided the development of our plans throughout. Even as we made our remote plans, we kept this goal before us. We know we can best achieve our vision of the academic achievement and growth as well as the mindsets and engagement of learning when we are in-person.”
Districts across Colorado are coping in different ways. Some have walked back plans to open to in-person learning or have hybrid strategies where students alternate in-school and at-home learning, thereby reducing the numbers of people in one place at one time. Elsewhere, colleges – many of them facing financial wreckage if they continued with online-only learning – have pivoted back to virtual classes after COVID-19 quickly materialized on campuses. If there’s a common thread, it’s that none of this is easy.
While four new cases surfaced in the county between Aug. 19-22, “the COVID landscape is still favorable for Buena Vista schools to reopen this week,” according to Chaffee County Public Health Director Andrea Carlstrom.
Additionally, local hospital capacity is stable, the schools and families are armed with safety protocols and by now, the color-coded levels for school attendance vs. staying home are common parlance.
Buena Vista’s schools open Thursday in the green zone, meaning local conditions are zero-to-mild transmission, and schools are deemed safe by the district and health officials for all students to be in class.
Roughly 1,000 BVSD students are expected to be in their classrooms, which is close to normal enrollment, according to Yates. Approximately 350 students are enrolled in high school, 200 in middle school, and 450 in elementary.
About 50 families have opted out of in-person learning and into alternative schooling programs. But new families enrolling in the district appear to have created a stable enrollment number going into the fall, according to Yates.
The district also has a homebound option in which students with medical needs study from home. She said two students are likely to participate.
Buena Vista schools are using half-day attendance on Thursday and Friday to help evaluate the myriad protocols necessitated by the pandemic. Full-day classes begin Monday, Aug. 31.
District higher-ups will quickly tell you that three layers of plans are in place. Should schools be at the green level and a student test positive for COVID-19, a county response team of public health, medical staff, and district leadership will determine if class, school, or district remote learning – from one to three days – is needed. The district has made arrangements for onsite childcare and learning support.
Should the area see increased COVID-19 transmission, the local hospital reaching capacity, or Chaffee County Public Health reaching test-and-trace capacity, the district then moves into the blue level.
Under blue level, Pre-K through grade 5 students are in school with increased distancing, or half of the students are in class in the morning and half in the afternoon. Older students would attend four classes per day; half at school in the mornings and half in the afternoons.
Should schools go to half-day routines, kids with intervention needs will be allowed to stay at school all day as needed, and families who need to send their children to school in order to work may also use the all-day option.
The final (red) option, if substantial COVID- community spread occurs, brings students into fully remote learning. District officials say that if the school has to go online, the plans are significantly more evolved than the emergency provisions employed last spring.
But for now, the plan is to have kids in school.
Outside experts in education and pediatrics concur that in-person learning is best for kids, and there are the painful statistics born out of last spring’s closures, which left school districts and families scrambling to educate the country’s 55 million students online. According to a paper released in May by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, students in the U.S., on average, will go into the new school year with 37-50 percent of the learning gains in math and 63-68 percent of gains in language arts skills they ordinarily would have had.
“In some grades, students may come back close to a full year behind in math,” the paper reports.
The researchers said, however, that not all students will fall behind. They predicted the top third of students will have continued to make gains in reading despite school interruptions.
Unsurprisingly, studies project a widening education gap among socioeconomic groups the longer kids stay out of the classroom. Disparities such as technology and safe, uncrowded study space – in addition to the availability of adults at home who can help – all come into play.
“Many districts are offering online as an option,” said Yates. “Our district leadership respects this response by other districts and yet holds strong convictions for not doing so.”
She described online learning as compromising the district’s mission of post-secondary preparedness, as well as that of the character and connectedness among kids.
“We believe online learning as an option contributes to long-term inequities in education across our nation,” she added. “With all the effort educators will make, online education has not demonstrated universal success for large groups of students.
“When we can be in person, we should,” she said. “We also believe that by using the data we have been able to provide a clear and consistent plan for our families.”
But while data and district officials point to in-person learning as the superior mode of educating children, there are the cautionary tales of shuttered summer camps and the well-known debacle at a high school in Dallas, Georgia, where photos of crowded halls and unmasked returning students surfaced shortly before six students and three staff members tested positive for the virus. The stories underscore the need for consistent, if not obsessive, caution, and the ability to move quickly from one learning setting to the next.
Tomorrow: The new normal at Buena Vista School District
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