District 158 moves to reopen elementary schools with hybrid plan

HUNTLEY – The Huntley Community School District 158 administration unveiled a plan Thursday night that would allow elementary students to return to school on a part-time basis starting Monday, Oct. 19.

In a move that one school board member called “baby steps,” the plan presented by Superintendent Scott Rowe would bring students in kindergarten through fifth grade back into the district’s five elementary schools, although only for the equivalent of one full day per week of in-person instruction from their teacher. The rest of the week would be a continuation of the remote learning now experienced by all of the district’s 8,800 students, a mix of remote live instruction via Zoom meetings or pre-planned videos and lessons the district calls “asynchronous learning.”

The plan would allow parents the option of choosing the hybrid plan of in-person and remote education, or to have their children continue in the fully remote model the district is currently using.

The district’s buildings have been closed to students since mid-March when Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered schools across the state to close in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus after a spike in numbers of Illinoisans testing positive for COVID-19.

The hybrid model introduced by the administration would divide elementary students into two groups, with the first group attending class in-person on Monday and Thursday mornings while members of the second group continued remote learning without a live teacher. The second group would be in class on Tuesday and Friday mornings while the first group stayed home for remote lessons. Both groups would be home all day on Wednesday with live remote learning in the afternoon.

It’s unlikely the hybrid plan presented would satisfy many of the approximately 100 parents who carried signs and listened to speakers outside the district’s administration building before the meeting. All of them called for the schools to reopen and their students to return to class.

“We’re very frustrated right now with our district not wanting to go back in and to continue to do remote learning, even though we were told back in July and August that we were going to be going to a hybrid model,” Dana Wiley, a parent of three students in district schools and an organizer of the protest, said before the meeting. “We’re frustrated with the lack of transparency right now from our board and our superintendent on what’s needed for our students to get back in the school, what are the metrics and the criteria.”

The metrics laid out by Rowe in a detailed presentation showed numbers from the three ZIP codes that comprise the district and included standards that would indicate whether the number of COVID-19 cases was increasing or decreasing locally, including the percentage of people who test positive for the virus, hospital admissions tied to the virus, and the growth or decline of new cases. Rowe said the standards were set by an epidemiologist of the McHenry County Department of Health.

“The county health department is recommending that we move to the hybrid model,” Rowe said. To move again, the community must maintain over two weeks the levels of positivity, new cases and hospital admissions.

“We are satisfactorily living within the metrics of all four categories,” Rowe said. He told the board the health department would soon issue a statement clearing all public school districts within the county to return to a hybrid model of educating their students.

Unlike some other school districts, Rowe’s presentation of the hybrid plan for elementary schools was tagged as “informational only,” as the district’s stance on school closings allows the administration to act on its own and is not a matter for board approval. In keeping with that, the board didn’t vote on the plan Thursday, although board President Anthony Quagliano gave board members the opportunity to publically oppose the plan.
While board members and administrators all agreed that a return to in-person education by district teachers was the ultimate goal for the district, only board member Lesli Melendy indicated her choice would be to fully reopen the schools now.
“Personally, I think the kids should be in school,” she said.
“That’s my personal opinion, but I also think we need to give (parents) choices.”

The district will send parents details of the plan on Friday and give them to Sept. 27 to indicate whether their children would take part in the hybrid plan or continue with solely remote education. Bus route information would be provided to parents closer to the Oct. 19 reopening.

Besides Wyley, four parents spoke before the board at the beginning of the meeting, with a couple dozen parents listening from the hallway outside the board room. Most of the speakers said they feared their children weren’t getting the education they needed and were falling behind as the bulk of the responsibility for educating their children had fallen to them. They also noted the economic damage to families that required at least one parent to be home to supervise children engaged in laptop learning.

Wiley also asked the board to explain what had happened in August when the district halted its plans for reopening the schools and moved toward remote learning, what some parents have called “the about-face,” a military term that refers to a sudden turn and marching in the opposite direction.

While Rowe had provided explanations in August about changes in the county and state’s COVID-19 stats as being the driving force behind the decision, Quagliano on Thursday explained for the first time that pressure from the district’s unions forced the shutdown.

“The about-face was we got some strong feedback from the two unions that represent our employees that they weren’t onboard yet in the current environment,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. You can’t have school in-person without enough teachers willing to come in and teach those classes. I can’t be any more direct in that regard.”

“You cannot compel staff members to come in and work if they’re not comfortable,” he said. “What changed from the time we put together that initial plan is their level of comfort with regards to what was going on in the county concerning rising cases at that time.”

Rowe said the unions have signed on with the plan to reopen the elementary schools under the administration’s hybrid plan.
Students in the district’s middle schools and high school will continue in fully remote learning, according to Rowe. He said the buildings, the age and behaviors of the students and other factors present a more complex problem for the administration to solve. The high school and middle school buildings don’t allow for the needed six feet of distancing between students or the limited size of classes, Rowe said. The district is examining the gradual expansion of educating small groups of students.
The district will continue to monitor county statistics on the presence of the coronavirus in the McHenry County population, Rowe said, and board members encouraged the posting of statistics and standards in a dashboard on the district’s website. Rowe said the full re-opening of schools appeared to be a long way away.

“I would say most like we’re going to be in a hybrid model for quite some time,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to be doing anything quick. … We need to be strategic and we need to be methodical about our approaches to ensure we don’t go backward.”

Quagliano said the move to the hybrid model didn’t mean elementary students would be returning to a “normal” setting at school as they experienced as recently as last winter. He advised parents not to set their expectations too high.

“It’s not going to be ‘normal,’” he said. “It’s not going to be what it was last year when they were going to school and they were on the playground and doing whatever. It’s not going to be all fun and games. … I’m sure the teachers will do their best to make it a happy and nurturing environment.”

“It’s going to be very different,” Rowe said. “It’s going to be a pretty sterile environment. The spacing that will be present, it’s going to look very different. The masks that everyone will be wearing, we’re all pretty used to that now but still. The students will be welcomed into the same warm, loving environment our teachers always provide, however, there are still the physical barriers that exist, whether it be a mask, or a mask and a face shield.”

As students return to the buildings, board member Melissa Maiorino Scheiblein encouraged the administration to post on the district’s website information about any positive tests or cases of COVID-19 by teachers and students at each school. She said parents could find the information useful in determining whether to send their children to the school on that day.

Not necessarily related to remote learning, the board learned Thursday that a six-day enrollment survey showed the district lost 334 students this year, to 8,824 students total, compared with 9,158 last year. While the numbers were down for each grade level and in each school, district Chief Technology Officer Chris Budzynski said, the biggest shift was in the size of last spring’s graduating class compared to the size of this year’s kindergarten class.

“It’s largely the difference between the large enrollment years we had ten, twelve, thirteen years ago and the smaller numbers we’re seeing in more recent years,” he said. “Based on those trends…if we were to keep the same 516 kindergarten enrollments over the course of the next eight years, our enrollment would actually go down almost 2,000 more students.”

Budzynski said the decreases were “possible” in coming years, although the district is seeing some new housing construction in the area. He said other projection models available to the district indicate a steeper drop in enrollment, although Budzynski didn’t present those numbers.