by Phil Blackwell
Jamesville-DeWitt has joined the steady parade of school districts in New York State rolling out its plans for what it hopes is the start of a new school year early in September.
What the district is proposing is that kindergarten and first-grade students will go full-time, five days a week, with second through 12th-grade students attending two days a week and disadvantaged students going every day except Wednesday.
“Coming back to school is not going to look like school did in the past,” said J-D superintendent Dr. Peter Smith.
The presentation was made at Monday night’s J-D Board of Education meeting, one week before Governor Andrew Cuomo was to make the announcement of whether the state’s public schools would open on time.
In recent weeks, districts in Central New York which had revealed their fall plans had mostly settled on variations of a “hybrid” model which had elementary school students have in-person classes two days a week.
Earlier in the day, the Syracuse City School District revealed its plans, which had students through eighth grade in classes twice a week but kept all high school instruction online.
Smith said this plan was based on both meetings with various school administrators and a survey of nearly 1,900 district parents to gauge their preferences.
For second through 12th-grade students, the plan is to go to in-person classes either on a Monday-Tuesday or Thursday-Friday schedule, with all students going to remote learning on Wednesdays.
Inspections of the various school buildings, said Smith, revealed that 16 to 17 students could fit into a classroom with social-distancing guidelines, instead of the usual 20 or 21.
What also guided the district’s plan was the result of the parents’ surveys which revealed, among other things, that 81.4 percent of respondents wanted their kids instructed in person, while nearly two-thirds of parents were comfortable with transporting their kids to school to free up space for buses.
Each student and staff member would have daily temperature screenings and would wear face coverings in the buildings, with hand-washing required throughout the day, staggered arrivals and departures, and a daily cycle of cleaning both school buildings and buses.
The importance of this topic led to extended questions and comments from each member of the J-D board, on issues ranging from temperature checks to possible COVID-19 infections to how teachers would address this format.
“This is an impossible situation, with an overwhelming number of details,” said board president Wendy Rhodes, acknowledging the challenges every school district faced in putting these plans together.
Smith said that temperature checks were planned, and that teachers, while not part of the initial process, would have plenty of input into learning plans and how they would teach different groups of students in person or online.
These plans will get submitted to the New York State Department of Education by the end of this week and also posted on the district’s web site. Smith said another survey will go out to parents in the days ahead to again get their input.
Due to all the issues still to be addressed before September, the next J-D board meeting was moved up a week, from Aug. 31 to Aug. 24.
