Kids on campus during COVID: Merced County high school shows how it can be done
Students at Hilmar High, the rare California secondary school that has opened to its full student population, said it’s good to be on campus even though every minute is a reminder that we’re still very much in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hilmar Unified School District in north Merced County opened on a hybrid schedule in early November, splitting high school students into two groups. One group is on campus Mondays and Tuesdays, and the other on Thursdays and Fridays. Initially, Wednesdays were distance learning for all.
This semester, though, Groups A and B began coming to school on alternating Wednesdays. So now, every other week, a student gets three days of in-person learning.
Meanwhile, elementary and middle school students have minimum-day instruction five days a week. Parents can opt for distance learning if they choose.
As they arrived for classes Wednesday morning, a handful of Hilmar High students took a moment to talk about how things have been going.
Senior Judith King said students start each day at 8:15 a.m. and stay on campus until 1 p.m. on Wednesdays, and until 3 p.m. the other days. During those hours at school, measures to keep students and staff safe include splitting lunch periods, serving prepackaged grab-and-go meals and enforcing the wearing of face masks, she said.
Get three warnings for not wearing a face mask and you’re suspended, added sophomore Teneal Adams, who noted that another safety protocol includes the cleaning of restrooms multiple times a day.
“I know a couple of her friends have been reprimanded for showing up without masks, so they’re taking it seriously,” said Teneal’s mom, Nikki Adams.
Senior Randy Lozano said teachers keep kids socially distanced in class, and students are responsible for sanitizing their hands every time they enter a classroom, as well as wiping down their desks.
Beats being at home
But health and safety measures are just means to the end, which is getting students as much face-to-face teaching and peer interaction as possible.
King said being back in the classrooms even on a hybrid schedule has resulted in her work getting done better and more efficiently. “Being on a (Google) Meet and trying to do a Google doc doesn’t work, so that part kind of sucked,” she said. Other than that, distance learning was OK, she said. “It was just hard because you don’t have a teacher there helping you.”
Senior Zoey Walton said learning online has been “a huge struggle.” She added that she’s made a big improvement in her grades, from below a 2.0 GPA while doing distance learning only to almost a 3.75 GPA now.
Teneal Adams agreed that being able to communicate with teachers is more challenging online. In person, “I’m able to ask teachers for help and they can show me what to do,” she said.
Her mother added, “She’s better hands-on, like if she can get one-on-one with the teachers. It’s a lot harder at home if she needs help. The emails, because there’s so many students on Zoom at once, it’s hard for the teachers to get back to them sooner. So if she can come on campus and physically talk to the teachers, it’s better for her.”
Beyond academics, there’s the plus of being back with classmates, students said, though campus still feels far from normal.
There are no rallies, but there are dress-up days, King said. No homecoming game, but the choosing of a royal court. After normally running track, she’s trying cross country — one of the outdoor sports that have been allowed to start — for the first time.
Having only half the students on campus at once feels odd, King said, and everyone has friends who are in the opposite group. But even on an uncrowded campus, “you definitely have to watch out. Some people don’t follow guidelines the same way that I think they should.“
Lozano, too, said being careful is crucial. “You can’t hang out with your friends as much because you don’t want to spread the disease and you want to keep your family safe.”
Walton said that this being her senior year, she especially appreciates chances to interact with classmates. “Tomorrow we have a senior lunch, actually, on the football field and we all get to eat pizza and, you know, hang out together, (with) social distance.”
Bringing kids back a ‘no-brainer’
Like most of Merced County’s 20 school districts, Hilmar Unified closed for in-person classes after the pandemic’s outbreak in March. Schools could reopen under state guidelines when a county is in the red, or second-highest, tier of coronavirus restrictions, or with a waiver. Most did not, and most counties quickly returned to the purple, or highest, tier. Hilmar, which has about 2,400 students, was an exception.
Still, opening even on a hybrid schedule has challenges — and risks. Two schools in the district — Hilmar High and Hilmar Middle School — are on Merced County’s workplace outbreaks list. The state defines an outbreak as three or more confirmed coronavirus infections tied to a workplace. If the workplace is an assisted living facility, even one infection puts the site on the outbreak list.
According to the district’s safety plan, employees go through wellness checks and are required to check their temperatures before coming to work. Any temperatures of 100.4 (Fahrenheit) or higher is considered a fever. “If an employee calls in sick or indicates they have COVID-like symptoms either through the wellness check or orally to their supervisor they will be required to stay home.”
Ten months into the pandemic, Isabel Cabral-Johnson, superintendent of Hilmar Unified School District, said sticking to the social distancing guidelines and sanitizing frequently is strictly enforced.
She said having kids back part of the week for in-person learning is a no-brainer. “We love having kids on campus,” she said.
“That’s still the best way for us to teach kids, (having) that in-person learning where you actually have that physical connection with kids, every day as often as you can. So having them here two to three days a week, helps a lot. It’s going really well — the teachers and administrators are pleased.”
Hilmar High teacher Mark Santos said he has seen a marked improvement in performance.
“Since students have been back I have seen an increase in students’ grades and overall classroom involvement..” he said.
“Teaching kids in the actual class is extremely important to me, as it allows me to create relationships with my students, which helps me learn how best I can teach and adapt to their needs. Learning happens when students and teachers are connected and trust each other; that was lacking with distance learning.”
As for the high school students, Cabral-Johnson “looks forward to the day that we can have them back five days a week. But with the social distancing guidelines we just can’t do that right now.”
Cabral-Johnson said having cohorts — groups of students and staff who interact just among themselves — is the best way to do social distancing. If there were fewer high school students, there wouldn’t need to be cohorts.
“But at the high school, we just don’t have enough space to be able to do the social distancing with all of our kids who wanted to come back,” she said. “Once again, if I didn’t have a lot of kids who wanted to come back, I could have done it (without the cohorts). There just wasn’t enough space, so we had to do a Cohort A and B.”
All Merced County school districts are still allowed to hold in-person classes for special education students and those with special circumstances.
Nathan Quevedo, spokesperson for Merced County Office of Education, is aware of only two other K-12 districts doing hybrid learning in Merced County: Dos-Palos Oro-Loma Joint School District and Le Grand Union High School District.
Merced Union High School District — which serves more than 10,000 students at six traditional high schools, three alternative schools and one adult school — expects its campuses to return to hybrid learning March 15.
In neighboring Stanislaus County, county health and education officials announced Tuesday that by March 15, they are aiming for school districts to be able to open junior highs and high schools to all students, using hybrid models similar to those in place at elementary schools.
It’s difficult to track how many school districts statewide are open for in-person learning or hybrid learning.
Jesse Nix, a spokesperson from the communications department for the California Department of Education, said the CDE doesn’t have an official count of schools or districts doing remote versus in-person learning at this time.
However, based on informal dialogue between the CDE and county superintendents, the state estimates as many as 300 school districts in California — or roughly about 30% — are in some form of in-person learning, while the remaining are primarily in distance learning.
Bee staff writer Julian A. Lopez contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 12, 2021 at 7:20 AM.
