Parents scramble to keep kids home, again

HUNTLEY, Il – An African proverb says It takes a village to raise a child, and it will take the entire Village of Huntley — in various configurations and combinations — to educate the children of District 158 as schools reopen but students stay at home to protect against exposure to COVID-19.

While teachers will teach in front of webcams and Zoom screens in classrooms empty of students, parents told MyHuntleyNews.com they will rely on their siblings, their own parents and in-laws, cousins, groups of rotating neighbors, other government programs, juggling schedules with their spouses or partners, and hiring strangers to keep their kids focused on remote learning programs while the parents attempt to bring needed income back to their households.

Nicole Black, a Huntley resident with son Liam, 7, entering second grade, and daughter Olivia, 6, going into first, both at Mackeven Elementary, only recently was able to return to work as a stylist at Blush Salon & Spa in Crystal Lake. Her husband, Adam, works for a commercial waterproofing company. When she received the survey from Huntley Community School District 158 asking for a choice for her children in the fall, there was only one answer.

“I chose the in-person school, five days a week,” Black said. “They were going to be full day.” That choice would help the family achieve a semblance of normalcy after months of togetherness dictated by the coronavirus.

At the beginning of the month, when District 158 announced children would be educated remotely for at least the first quarter of the school year, Black and thousands of other parents had to scramble to figure out how to make it work as the first day of school, Aug. 21, was a few weeks away. Black was fortunate that her family and her husband’s family lived nearby.

Black’s sister has her own children in District 158 schools with a kindergartner and a third-grader at Martin Elementary on the Reed Road campus, as well as a 7-month-old at home. She was also hoping to return to working a couple days each week outside her home. Throwing in their mother, Mary Damhauser, and Black’s mother-in-law, Peggy Black, a plan began to emerge for a group of cousins to be focused on their work while being supervised by an adult. It’s complicated, though, with the kids being switched every other day between the sisters during one week, then between the mother and mother-in-law every other week.

“My sister and I kind of went through it on a Sunday,” Black said. “We sat around a table and worked it out.” In keeping with the high-tech learning environment, the schedule is kept on their phones instead of a calendar hung on the fridge.

While it’s a solution, for Black it’s not the ideal one. She said she’d rather have the kids back in school to give the children a sense of organization and routine, and to allow them to socialize with their friends.

Black said she’s come across other people in Huntley who have more complex and creative solutions. One friend, a teacher in neighboring District 300, has been trying to form a parent pod with a group of students who would isolate together — meaning their families would associate only with each other — and hire the teacher to direct the children’s learning. She said a Facebook group discussion also resulted in five pairs of neighbors agreeing to form a pod that would allow their children to rotate from home to home each school day while allowing their parents to return to work four days a week.

District 158 Superintendent Scott Rowe said the impact on the families of students was of great concern to his administration when they decided in favor of remote learning for at least the first quarter of the school year. He said administrators knew their decision to put health and safety first for students, teachers, and staff would create difficulties for many families.

The District sent out a letter to the families of all students: “We understand that this decision will cause substantial disruption to the lives of many, and that reality is painful to all involved. Unfortunately, the reality we are facing is one of life and death.”

Ironically, it may have been the desire of most families to try to return to normal that forced the district to keep students at home.

A survey of parents early in the summer asked then how they wanted their children educated, either in school, at home, or a hybrid mixture of the two. Rowe said administrators were surprised at the high percentage of respondents who wanted their kids in school.

“At the high school, the numbers just did not meet our expectations,” he said. Fewer than 20% of families opted for remote learning, Rowe said, while administrators had thought the figure would be 30% to 40%. And the plans to keep so many children apart throughout the school day just didn’t work.

The idea of having 1,250 high school students “flowing through the high school” created worry among the administration that they would be unable to keep students in masks and at acceptable social distance, the superintendent said.

“Teenagers want to, naturally, hang with their friends,” Rowe said. And while the massive high school allowed enough space to social distance, the tendency for teenagers to be teenagers could close that distance fast. That effect has been demonstrated in newscasts from around the country as high schools reopened to crowded halls, little social distance, and an absence of masks.

In the elementary schools, the numbers were similar. Only 22% of parents of sixth-graders wanted their children to stay home. The numbers told administrators classes would have to be as large as 25 or 26 students in each room, numbers that Rowe said would be unsafe.

The administration recruited staff from across the district to develop a plan to deal with the number of students who wanted to return to school. Hundreds of teachers, administrators and others joined committees and study groups, spending thousands of man hours studying the possibility and coming up with a plan to bring students back to the classroom.

For the sixth-graders, the administration planned to trim the classes and have students attend only every other day. Still, they found they needed to staff the classrooms with people the administrator believes make the schools special. The schools’ 12 instructional coaches, who help teachers advance their skills and introduce technology into the classroom, would have to instead move into a classroom. The Project Lead the Way STEM program, with its seven teachers, would also have to go, as its teachers would be needed elsewhere.

“We were talking of pausing that program for a year and moving those teachers back into the classroom,” Rowe said. Still, he said, their final plan was solid and addressed nearly all issues. Only when it came to implementing the plan did problems present themselves, and they all had to do with how to keep students, teachers and staff safe from COVID-19.

The district planned to use school nurses as contact tracers should anyone in their school develop the virus, according to Rowe. But with discussions of children in school buses and children and teachers in classrooms, the potential numbers grew too large, he said.

“A busload of 40 students (who suddenly test positive for the virus) would close a school,” he said.

Discussions Rowe has on a regular basis with superintendents in McHenry County, and on a weekly basis with superintendents of other unit school districts, offered no solutions the Huntley administration hadn’t already considered.

“Nobody had good answers to the same problem,” he said. With those problems in mind, the district decided the health of students and staff had to be paramount, and it could only close the school buildings and offer education remotely. Nearly every other public school district in northern Illinois decided to do the same.

The plan now calls for most of the district’s teachers to return to their classrooms where they will teach via the internet, made possible by the district’s purchase of hundreds of webcams.  However, hundreds of the district’s teachers will be teaching from their own homes, due to individual health concerns or child care difficulties.

Rowe said the plan now is to bring small groups of students into school buildings to meet their special needs. These groups would also serve as a beginning to return to the classrooms. If there are no spikes of the virus, the idea is to expand and get more students back to school, he said.

While the Oct. 16 date — the end of the first quarter and the day after a school board meeting — might mean something to the administration and the people of the district, the virus has shown over the past eight months that  it has its own calendar, which so far no one has been able to see.

Deseriee DiMaria sees herself and daughter Valerie, 9, a fourth-grader at Conley Elementary, and 4-month-old Cali, as “one of the fortunate” families in Huntley. Her work schedule as a stylist at Shine Salon and Dry Bar in West Dundee, allows her Monday and Tuesday at home, mornings off on other days. Her mother will in Wednesday through Friday. The family schedule, then, is a little less complicated than others’. She looks for the fall online curriculum to be better organized and more formally structured than the online offerings of the spring.

“It’ll be a little easier this time, in the aspect of she will be logging onto the computer in the morning and have more of a schedule,” DiMaria said. “Before, we just tried to get it done before a certain time of day, but it took three to four solid hours straight, a lot of arguing  and a lot of frustration. “

DiMaria said the involvement of a live teacher in a Zoom-like application should make the difference.

“Maybe it will be easier because they will be watching virtually their teacher in the classroom, as opposed to their parents trying to be the teachers,” she said, although DiMaria said the ideal situation for her daughter would be to join the teacher in the classroom.

That situation is complicated times three for Danny Duda, with a son, also Danny, entering Huntley High School this year, and younger children Eliza in first grade and Aydan in third. His wife is a nurse and hasn’t stopped working since the virus arrived, but the couple is fortunate that Duda has been able to work from home as a Cook County probation officer. Until he’s called back to the office in Rolling Meadows, he’s home to oversee the kids.

Danny the high-schooler said the remote offerings in the spring were too easy and too quickly completed. He was able to finish his assignments within an hour to 90 minutes of waking up, he said. The family hopes the system will be more substantive this time.

“I think this is going to be a lot more structured, with a lot more live interaction to it,” Duda said. The family has put together individual work spaces for the children.

“We each have our own little offices,” he said. “…It’s going to be challenging but we’ll make it work because it needs to work. We’ll get creative if we have to, and hopefully it doesn’t last long.”

Matt Kemblowski and his wife, Julie, have their own three elementary students—Maggie, 10, a fifth-grader, and Kate, 8, a third-grader, both at Martin Elementary, along with Nora, 6, who will enter first grade at May Chesak Elementary—along with 16-month-old Toby. But with both parents able to stay at home, where Matt works remotely as a recruiting manager, they have worked out the details around remote learning for three children.

Kemblowski said the design of their house offers multiple levels, which they have used to provide privacy for each student to participate in Zoom sessions with their teachers and classmates. He said the family is looking forward to the remote learning to be steps above what was offered in the spring by teachers who were given little time to plan or resources to make it work.

Even with improved curriculum, Kemblowski said he and his wife would prefer to have their children in the classroom, because while learning is important, so are the social aspects of live interation with other students and the teacher.

“A Zoom call is no replacement for face-to-face,” he said.