Pending board approval, Charles City students to make full return to classrooms

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

If the Charles City School District Board of Directors approves it at Monday’s meeting, the Comets will be back in the house.

The school district plans to begin a phased reopening of grades 6-12 beginning Oct. 19, and be fully reopened by Nov. 2.

Under the plan, the middle school will fully reopen to in-person learning through a phased process, while the high school will reopen using a modified schedule, with students in grades 9-10 in the building four days a week and students in grades 11-12 in the building three days a week.

Elementary students in the district have been learning in their buildings full time since the school year started.

The School-To-You option will remain in place for any parents who choose to take it. School-To-You is a state-mandated online learning option that will be available for the entire school year.

Charles City Superintendent Mike Fisher will recommend the plan to the board Monday. The meeting will be held at 6:15 p.m. at the high school. Persons wanting to make comments are welcome to attend or watch the meeting live on the Charles City School District’s Facebook page.

If the board votes to approve the plan, the middle school will fully reopen to in-person learning through a phased process. The district’s 6th-graders will begin full five day per week in-person learning beginning Oct. 19, 7th graders will begin Oct. 27 and 8th-graders will begin Nov. 2.

The high school will fully open using a modified schedule starting Oct. 27. The district said the high school is using this strategy due to environmental factors within the campus. Students in grades 9-10 will attend in person four days per week, while students in grades 11-12 will attend in person three days per week.

The district said in a release that this all “will occur as long as COVID conditions remain stable and healthy.”

Currently, students in grades 6-12 are attending school through a hybrid plan that includes some on-site learning and learning from home. Students in grades 6-8 attend school in person on either Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday, with alternating Wednesday attendance. Students participate in required remote learning the days not attending in person.

Students in grades 9-10 attend school on Monday/Thursday with alternating Wednesdays, and 11-12 grade students attend school on Tuesday/Friday with alternating Wednesdays. High school students also participate in required remote learning the days not attending in person.

It was expected that the school district would continue with this hybrid plan until at least the end of this semester, however Gov. Kim Reynolds announced new changes and additional guidelines for businesses and schools regarding COVID, including new face-covering guidelines that gave the district more options.

The new guidance states that if all students are wearing facemasks, and are within the 6-foot radius for more than 15 minutes, they would no longer be automatically subject to quarantine if somebody in that radius tested positive.

Reported cases of COVID-19 in the school district have gone down substantially in the last three weeks. There were no new cases reported at all last week, and none have been reported this week, through Thursday evening.

With that new information in mind, the school board directed a staff task force of teachers, students, leadership, bus drivers and para-educators to work on a plan to safely reopen and develop a draft matrix for decision making.

There were also more than 50 emails sent from parents with additional information and comments. The board reported that the emails were evenly split between remaining in hybrid and returning to on-site learning.

The board discussed the options and timeline for reopening or remaining in hybrid at a work session on Wednesday.

The adjusted hybrid plan at the high school, which Fisher will recommend, came from the teaching staff.

Jim Lundberg, an agricultural teacher at Charles City High School for more than 37 years, proposed the plan to the board, and told the school board he had spoken to a number of high school staff members who all shared similar concerns.

“At the moment, our building is pretty healthy, as far as I know, but to think that we are finished with this virus, and it’s time to go back to normal would be wrong,” Lundberg said. “It’s just a matter of time before we see another outbreak.”

Lundberg said much of the faculty, however, wants to get back to as close to normal as possible, as the current hybrid schedule has been challenging and demanding for teachers.

“It’s been really difficult to build relationships with students, especially the underclassmen, in the early weeks,” he said.

High school social studies teacher Sarah Downing agreed.

“In general, the high school teachers really want to be able to see our students more,” she said. “To be honest, however, social distancing is very difficult at the high school, as most classrooms don’t allow for the spacing needed.”

Lundberg called the plan a “transition step” that could make it easy for the students and teachers to go to full on-site learning when that time comes, but would also make it easy to go back to the original hybrid schedule if that was necessary due to another spike in cases or other unforeseen circumstances.

“It maintains a systematic process that our staff would like to make happen,” Lundberg said.

CCHS Principal Bryan Jurrens said he was OK with the proposal, and that he would not need to change the master schedule if the plan were implemented.

“I do like it,” Jurrens said. “I think it’s got some good potential.”

Middle school teachers Renee Boss, Leanne Smith and Lindsey Staudt also addressed the board Wednesday.

Staudt said she had surveyed middle school teachers and para-educators who primarily work with at-risk students and asked them if they’d prefer a slow phase-in process or a full return right away. She said that 77% of the teachers she surveyed said they preferred a slow phase-in process. She said 71% preferred returning to school full-time, rather than a hybrid learning process.

“Our schedule has been working really well, and I think we would be able to transition to full-time learning rather easily,” Staudt said. “Most of our classrooms at the middle school, we are able to social distance. There are a few problem areas that we could improve on, but I think we would be able to work something out.”

Boss, the middle school band instructor, said that her students were having a difficult time when learning from home on their own within the hybrid model.

“Bringing them back together, at school five days a week, would help out a lot, academically,” she said.

She added that should the situation arise that the district would have no choice but to go back to a hybrid model, the teachers could do that more smoothly now, since they’ve already experienced it once.

“I think we would be able to do that in one or two days without much difficulty,” she said.

Boss warned that if the middle school were to go back full-time learning, that the district would need to enforce full-time mask wearing. She said that classroom sizes would present challenges with social distancing, “but we are anxious to get our middle school rehearsals going again.”

CCMS Principal Tom Harskamp said although precautions are undoubtedly necessary, a return to on-site learning was a step in the right direction.

“We want to do what’s best to reach our kids,” Harskamp said. “We can’t throw COVID out the window, but we can’t stop doing what we were meant to do — and that’s serve. We got into this business to serve kids.”

He said in order to do that well, the kids need to be in the classroom.

The district said that with the numbers and physical space of the middle school, as well as the high quality air flow with its heating and air conditioning system, the middle school’s reentry teams determined that with proper face coverings and continued efforts to social distance when possible, that the campus can safely reopen. In addition, the district said the size of the 6th grade class has made it possible to exempt those students from future hybrid models.

Due to the physical constraints of the space in the high school classrooms, class sizes and an older, less effective heating air flow system, the district’s reentry team determined that the high school can fully reopen, but still limit some full days of classes to help slow the future spread of COVID.

The board will also consider approval of a health matrix created by staff, leadership, and public health that will guide all future school board decisions of pivoting to hybrid. Grades 7-12 will now move to hybrid for two-week increments if COVID and attendance rates worsen.

The health matrix takes into consideration student absence rates and transmission rates within Floyd County as metrics to determine whether to remain teaching on site, to go back to the hybrid learning plan, or — in a worst-case scenario — closing school altogether and doing all teaching online, an action that would need approval of the Iowa Department of Education.