By Patrick Adrian [email protected]
CLAREMONT — The Claremont School District’s reopening proposal for 2020-2021 received a mixed and at some points divided reception from the Claremont School Board on Sunday, only days before the board will officially vote on the plan.
Claremont Superintendent Michael Tempesta and Assistant Superintendent Donna Magoon delivered an overview of the reopening plan to the board in the Stevens High School auditorium, to give members of the body more time to digest the information in preparation for a broader community discussion and board decision scheduled Wednesday.
Claremont’s plan proposes reopening schools under a hybrid instructional model in which students attend school in-person two days per week and spend three days per week in remote learning. Students across grades K-12 will be split into small cohorts, with some cohorts attending school on Mondays and Thursdays and the other cohorts attending school on Tuesdays and Fridays. All students would learn remotely on Wednesdays, which the district will use for additional building cleaning and teacher preparation.
For additional safety precautions, masks will be required for staff and students inside the school buildings, including classrooms, with breaks from wearing masks permitted when the wearer is at least six feet apart from others. Students must also have their temperature checked before boarding a school bus or entering their school building. Students with either a fever of 100 degrees or more, body chills or aches or a new runny nose or congestion will need to stay out of school for either 10 days or until one receives a negative result from a COVID-19 test.
But some board members questioned the choice of the hybrid instructional model over allowing students a choice to fully return to classroom learning.
“Are we really planning for families?” board member Jason Benware asked. “Because this model right now is going to put a lot of people into poverty. How do you find people who have full-time jobs to suddenly figure out what they’re going to do with their kids on the days they aren’t [in school]?”
“The short-term solution to this problem potentially has catastrophic long-term consequences to our families and our community,” said board Vice Chair Heather Whitney.
Fellow board member Michael Petrin, along with Benware and Whitney, all questioned why the reopening committee — a 70-member panel composed of school administrators, educators and community stakeholders — did not consider giving families a choice between a full-time return to classroom instruction or full-time remote learning.
While recognizing the risks of the novel coronavirus, Whitney said the committee needed to better weigh the actual risks, based on the region’s low infection rate, with the risks to prolonging the economic strain on families to have their kids at home three days per week, particularly in a city where the median family income is barely above the poverty level.
“We know in the medical and public health community that poverty is a major risk factor for illness and poor health,” Whitney said. “So if we ignore that our actions could be pushing people into more economic hardship, then we’re negatively influencing the health of our community.”
The board members also pointed out that Claremont and its surrounding regions have been mostly unaffected by the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. There have only been 40 total confirmed cases of the virus in Sullivan County, and 15 total in Claremont, the county’s most populous municipality. Currently, with four active cases, Claremont has an infection rate of .03% while Sullivan County has an infection rate of .01%.
Board members also questioned the actual increase in safety the Claremont hybrid instructional plan would provide over full-classroom attendance. Overall, the plan would reduce student capacity in most classrooms to allow a recommended distance between people of six feet. However, Tempesta noted that some classrooms at Stevens High School are designed too narrowly and might only be able to accommodate three feet per person.
Additionally, the busses, even at reduced capacity, will only provide a distance of three feet per student, with one student per seat, or two if from the same families.
“If we’re willing to give three feet of distance on a school bus, why isn’t three feet good enough in the classroom?” Benware asked.
Tempesta said that questions about staffing factored heavily into considering hybrid over a full return to classroom.
Bus transportation alone would be problematic, given the recommended health guidelines of three feet per student, Tempesta said. Claremont has the same number of busses as its neighboring town of Newport but twice the number of student riders, a reality that may make it difficult for the district to contain busses to single routes when simultaneously reducing ridership by half. Statewide shortages of bus drivers will make meeting the demand of a full-time in-person instructional model even more trying.
Tempesta also couldn’t determine what staffing will look like. This week the district plans to find out how many teachers will plan to return to the classrooms to teach. Many teachers in the district are in the age group more at risk from the novel coronavirus. In addition to not wanting to put staff at greater risk, Tempesta said that some teachers may not return to the building due to health concerns in their home. Some teachers eligible for retirement may also opt to retire now.
Additionally, the collective bargaining unions will need to approve of the plan, Tempesta said, and that union representatives took part in the committee’s reopening plan and are already familiar with the district’s hybrid instructional plan. But if the board directed the district to pursue a full-classroom option, Tempesta had less confidence that the educators would approve.
Time was also a factor, the superintendent added. With the first day of school just five weeks away, there is not sufficient time to reconfigure a complete change in course.
“I don’t know how we would get the people in,” Tempesta said. “It’s taken a lot of time all summer just to get this plan, and the only thing I do know is that plan, whether it’s adopted or an integration of it is adopted, could change two weeks from now [given the continually changing events].”
The choice of the hybrid instructional model “is predicated on getting back to normalcy as much as possible but in a way that is as safe as possible,” Tempesta said.
Board Chair Frank Sprague and member Carolyn Towle voiced support for the district’s more cautious hybrid approach.
“The hybrid [instructional model] is the prelude to hopefully not see a rise in cases in October or November, so we don’t have to [return to fully remote learning],” Towle said. “So if we go in [with] caution… and keep our numbers down, we can start opening up at the [less restrictive] stage.”
Board member Rob Lovett said he is still “on the fence” about the idea of fully reopening the schools.
“I’m absolutely in agreement that we’ve had phenomenally low [infection] numbers… but I am not by nature a gambling person,” Lovett said. “I’m still not entirely sure what I’m going to decide for my children. It’s definitely not up to me to decide for the rest of these children.”
The district will hold another presentation of the proposed plan on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m.
Presentation of survey data receives criticism
A Claremont school community survey drew criticism this week from school board members, who accused the district of using a faulty evaluation method to interpret the survey’s findings.
Some board members took issue with the district’s presentation of data from a recent school community survey, saying that it applied a flawed point system to reflect more favorably toward reopening schools under a hybrid instructional model even though most surveyed parents and students said they preferred a full return to classroom instruction.
The survey results were incorporated into a 99-panel slideshow presentation on Sunday, overviewing the district’s proposed hybrid instructional model to open the 2020-2021 school year. Under the plan, Claremont students will attend school in-person twice per week and learn remotely three days per week. The hybrid instructional model is designed to reduce the number of students in the classroom at one time by dividing students into smaller cohorts and scheduling their school attendance on alternate days.
But board members questioned the use of survey data to suggest that the hybrid model aligned with the community’s preferences.
In July, the district’s reopening committee — a 70-member group composed of school administrators, board members, school staff and community stakeholders — surveyed parents, staff and students, asking them to rank the three possible school operating models by order of personal preference. The three models are full in-school learning, full remote learning or a hybrid instructional model, in which the student alternates between in-school and remote learning.
In all surveyed groups, fully in-school instruction was the most preferred model, receiving 450 votes from 1,000 parents, 120 votes from 230 students and 150 votes from 300 staff.
The hybrid instructional model was the overwhelming second preference among every survey group.
Rather than present the data in its raw form, the survey committee created a weighted point scale to give each model a numerical rank. The committee awarded each model two points per first preference vote and one point per second preference vote.
In doing so, the hybrid instructional model, based on its second-choice tallies, ranked highest in every survey.
School board members criticized this presentation of the data, saying that the selection of the hybrid instructional model as a second preference does not reflect the community’s support for it, because the survey required them to make second and third choices.
“There are people out there who don’t want a second choice,” said school board member Jason Benware. “By forcing them to make a second choice they assign points to something they don’t support in the least bit. That in itself is flawed.”
Benware said he felt the survey as a whole felt skewed toward the hybrid model, which the district was already looking at in June, before the state Department of Education released its guidelines.
“When I filled out the survey as a parent, I could tell [from reading it] what direct people wanted to go already,” Benware said.
Fellow board member Michael Petrin agreed.
“If people are choosing between fully in-school or fully remote, their second choice is [typically] going to be the one where they at least get 50% of what they want,” Petrin pointed out. “If you look purely at first choice, the results come out quite a bit different.”
In an interview with the Eagle Times on Monday, Claremont School Board Chair Frank Sprague said he has found the language problematic in the school surveys as a whole.
Importantly, the survey questions closely mirror those in the statewide survey conducted in May, which helped inform the recommendations of New Hampshire’s reopening committee, School Transition Reopening and Restructuring Task Force (STRRT) to the governor and education commissioner. School districts across the state have released surveys with identical questions.
Sprague said many of the survey questions are poorly worded and ultimately result in differing messages.
“If asking someone if they preferred to have their kids back in school, who would say they wouldn’t want that?” Sprague said. “But what if the question asked,‘if it could possibly cause harm to you or your family members, what would your preference be’?”
Sprague noted the glaring disconnect between two particular survey questions. Only 45% of parents and 28% of students surveyed in Claremont said they felt completely or mostly comfortable about returning to school, even with all possible safety precautions in place. These numbers would mathematically include survey takers who identified in-school learning as their first choice.
Surveys in Newport and Fall Mountain posted similar results. In the Fall Mountain Regional School District, half, or 50% of the surveyed parents, said their first preference was a full return to classroom instruction, but only 25% of parents said they were completely or mostly comfortable about sending their child to school. In Newport, which plans to offer families a choice between full in-school instruction or fully remote learning, less than 30% of surveyed families said they were “highly comfortable” about their children returning to school even with safety provisions in place.
Sprague, who supports a hybrid instructional model over a full return to the classrooms, said schools need to factor many considerations beyond just community preferences. Returning students safely to school remains his top concern.
As a longtime former school principal in Newport and Claremont, Sprague said the transition back to school is already stressful and chaotic for students, but the pandemic is going to dramatically escalate the emotional stresses. The school environment will be a difficult adjustment in the fall, with numerous restrictions to social interaction, masks and other safety policies.
Additionally, the district would need to guarantee it has sufficient staffing for a full return to school, including additional staffing in many required areas, Sprague said.
Currently, the district is still determining how many of its current faculty and staff plan to return in the fall. Some may have documented health issues that will prevent them from returning, and others who are eligible for retirement may opt to retire.
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