By Patrick Adrian
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New Hampshire school districts will have considerable flexibility in planning their school openings in September, including autonomy on policies around social distancing, classroom capacities and mask-wearing, according to new state guidelines.
On Tuesday, the New Hampshire Department of Education released their back-to-school guidelines for the 2020-2021 school year, which provides options and recommendations to districts for operating their schools while minimizing the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus.
The 54-page document, while encouraging the safety recommendations of state and federal health officials, aims to allow individual districts the flexibility to adopt reasonable and realistic safety policies based on their local demographics and resources.
“Flexibility,” explained Gov. Chris Sununu at a press conference yesterday afternoon. “That’s what everyone understood was needed in a state like New Hampshire: local flexibility with comprehensive safety guidelines.”
Sununu noted that statewide mandates would be difficult to implement when the differences between New Hampshire communities and districts vary so greatly.
“A little elementary school in Croydon, with 30 students, is very different from Manchester High School, with 1,500 students,” Sununu said. “[The aim] was not to create something so rigid it would be doomed to fail.”
The guidelines give minimal directives to districts toward developing their plan. To illustrate the flexibility of the state’s document, the word “should” — which carries little if any legal enforceability — appears 155 total times in the state guidelines. In contrast, the word “must” only appears 18 times.
Though the state will not mandate the wearing of masks in school buildings, districts will have the authority to require them in their own policies. The guidelines advise districts to consider how to address students who will not wear masks, populations who should not wear masks and times and places where masks should be worn.
While the guidelines encourage many of the recommendations by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), such as spacing student desks at least 6 feet apart or limiting classroom and bus capacities to accommodate social distancing, Sununu said that districts should base their policies on what’s realistic or feasible. For example, the state will accept classrooms that might only be able to provide distances of three or four feet per student.
There are some mandates scattered throughout the plan. According to the guidelines, people who are suspected of or test positive for COVID-19 must stay out of school until medically cleared to return. Schools must maintain adequate ventilation systems and keep a list of cleaning chemicals used to sanitize the building. Schools that stagger their lunch periods must not schedule a lunch before 11 a.m. Additionally, the state will require building visitors to wear masks.
Perhaps the most challenging requirement for many schools will be accommodating students and faculty who will not return to the building due to health concerns. According to Sununu, schools will need to provide education to students who opt to learn remotely.
The guidelines also say that teachers “must not perform double duty” by simultaneously providing remote instruction to students at home alongside teaching students in-class. Alternative recommendations include pairing remote learners with teachers who wish not to return to the building or connecting remote students with online learning courses.
Newport Superintendent Brendan Minnihan said that the guidelines described by Sununu were not surprising, as the state Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut had already said the plan would be highly focused on local control and flexibility.
Minnihan said the district plans to submit a plan to the Newport School Board by the end of July. If approved, the district can begin preparing faculty, staff, students and families for the implementation.
Minnihan hopes to bring back students who want to learn in the building, with safety measures in place, he said. Should the health landscape prevent that, Newport will have a plan in place to rotate students between in-school instruction and remote learning, and if a hybrid-model is not possible, a remote-learning model with improvements made from the spring.
One of the biggest challenges will hinge on how many students and faculty will not want to return, Minnihan said.
“We sent surveys to all of our families and staff, and probably not surprising there are varying degrees of feelings about returning to school and the pros and cons of that,” he said.
New Hampshire districts have a relatively short window to determine how many students will need remote instruction and the staff available to deliver it.
Minnihan also noted that districts may need to factor the range in grades levels and needs of those remote learners, not just the number of students. For example, a pre-K teacher might not be able to best serve a group of 20 remote students if half of them were in high school and needed instruction outside the teacher’s experience.
Minnihan said to facilitate preparing for those needs, the district intends to continue conversations with families and provide updates about the plan in development.
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