Modesto City Schools board to hear reopening update next week. Forums bring questions
The Modesto City Schools proposal for reopening elementary schools will be presented Monday at a Board of Education special workshop, participants in online community forums were told this week and last.
The plan, which would return transitional-kindergarten through sixth-grade students to classrooms on some days, and keep them learning from home on others, also will be presented to the board at its regular Oct. 19 meeting, district spokeswoman Krista Noonan said during the second online forum, Monday afternoon. The first forum was Thursday evening.
If the board on Oct. 19 votes to move forward with the plan, its application for a waiver to reopen in-person TK-6 learning would be submitted to county and state health officials. That could happen Oct. 20, Noonan said.
Once the plan is approved, the district may begin a phased-in reopening, “perhaps bringing back transitional kindergarten through second grade, then waiting a time period, say two weeks, bring back grades three and four, waiting two weeks, and then bringing back grades five and six,” she said. “And that includes preschool as well.”
Public comment can be made at both upcoming board meetings, Noonan said, and MCS families also are asked to submit by noon Wednesday their response to a survey about the draft TK-6 reopening plan. There also is a survey for families of seventh- through 12th-grade students, with the same deadline. Both are available in English and Spanish.
After Superintendent Sara Noguchi and members of her cabinet presented a summary of the draft reopening plan, they took questions from their virtual audience.
One parent wanted to know if full distance learning will remain available for families who don’t want to return their children to school even in a rotating schedule in which only half the students would be on campus any given day. Associate Superintendent Brad Goudeau replied that’s why the district is seeking survey feedback. “We really need to get a gauge for who wants to start in-person learning and who is hesitant to send their children back for in-person,” he said.
The district still is in the planning stages to determine what the structure for in-person learning will be, he said. “That structure will be dependent upon our staffing and which teachers are teaching in the classroom for in person and what teachers we may be able to use to do distance learning.”
Families will be asked to help with transportation
Asked about safety protocols on school buses, Associate Superintendent Tim Zearley said each bus will have a hand sanitizer just inside the door, and all students and drivers will be required to wear masks. The buses will be loaded from rear to front, and unloaded from front to rear, he said, “and then there will be one student per seat on the bus to minimize contact between students.”
That drastically reduces the capacity on buses, Noguchi noted, so families will be asked to provide their own student transportation to the greatest extent possible.
Regarding social distancing in classrooms, Goudeau said he’s been part of a team that has visited classrooms to look at desk layouts. He said that with only half of the students attending at one time — possibly fewer if a class has students that continue distance learning only — and with teacher workstations reconfigured and nonessential furniture removed, “we would be able to meet that 6 feet social-distancing requirement.”
“May there be rooms across our district that don’t meet that capability?” he added. “It’s possible. We’ll take those on a case-by-case basis.”
Upcoming cold and flu season was another concern raised. Associate Superintendent Mark Herbst said, yes, it likely will be difficult to discern at first whether an illness is COVID-19 or the seasonal flu. “Either way, though, the consistency is that you’re not feeling well, you’re running a temperature, etc.,” he said. “So the reminder then again would be if you’re experiencing flulike symptoms or COVID-like symptoms, stay home, and we recommend you get tested. We would go from there.”
Why not wait until after holidays?
The last question fielded was with Halloween, Thanksgiving, various December holidays and New Year’s ahead, with all the gathering they traditionally bring, has Modesto City Schools considered delaying reopening until after the holiday break in January?
Noguchi answered that the district intends to move forward with the TK-6 reopening plan. “We are astutely aware of the holidays that are quickly approaching, in addition to winter coming and folks being inside, so we monitor it daily,” she said. “... If we see a spike in cases and we see that our positivity rate is climbing, then that’s the conversation that we will have with our teachers association along with the Board of Education on looking at the best way to proceed.”
Sixteen of the 24 public school districts in Stanislaus County have submitted waiver applications, and 11 have been approved as of Tuesday morning. Some of the very small districts in the county have resumed in-person learning.
The latest districts to have their waiver applications OK’d are Patterson and Valley Home, which gained approval Monday. Patterson Joint Unified’s plan says it will reopen no sooner than Oct. 19. The plan for Valley Home, which has an enrollment of just 118, indicates it could reopen immediately.
Riverbank Unified’s plan was approved Oct. 2. “We have not yet established our opening date but have informed our school community that we looking at October 26 or the first week of November,” Superintendent Christine Facella told The Bee in an email Tuesday.
This story was originally published October 6, 2020 at 2:21 PM.
