Modesto City Schools TK-6 campuses just took a big step toward getting back to normal
Children at Modesto City Schools elementary campuses got to see the faces (albeit masked) of a lot more friends Monday as cohorts were combined, giving kids four days of in-person learning instead of two.
The Turlock Unified School District did the same, and its Board of Trustees is set to receive an update Tuesday night on the reopening of elementary and secondary schools. The Turlock board’s open session is set to start at 6:45 p.m., and the meeting is live-streamed at www.turlock.k12.ca.us/virtualboardmeetings.
The principals of two Modesto schools visited by The Bee said that staff, students and parents were excited for the big step closer to traditional classroom learning and that things went smoothly as children arrived and settled in.
To prepare for merging cohorts, the district asked families to commit to the four days of classroom instruction or to 100% distance learning. Wednesdays remain a distance-learning day for all students.
At Beard Elementary, on Bowen Avenue, about 82% of the students returned to campus, Principal Beth Weston said. That includes all of the children who were attending just twice a week, plus students who’d been only distance learning but whose families decided the time is right to return them to the classroom. “So today was the very first day for some of our kiddos. ... We were excited about that,” Weston said.
The district still was working to collect data Monday on the overall number of TK-6 students whose families opted for classroom instruction.
It was a welcome challenge Monday at Beard to have so many more children to greet and to ensure the newbies understood the routines, the principal said. Those include directional arrows for moving about campus and using the correct one of four color-coded entrances depending on what cohort a student is in. “We just wanted to make sure that the kids felt comfortable and safe and knew where they were going,” Weston said.
The children are following the same daily schedule as they did in alternating cohorts, which is just about an hour shy of a full, pre-COVID-19 school day.
What if classroom is at capacity?
At a February meeting of the district’s school board, Associate Superintendent Brad Goudeau cautioned that when families were asked to choose between in-person and distance learning, a teacher could get more returning students than the classroom could accommodate, given social-distance guidelines. But Weston said that didn’t turn out to be an issue at her school, which was able to accommodate every student who wanted to come back.
It wasn’t a problem at Fairview Elementary, located on West Whitmore Avenue in southwest Modesto, either, Principal Jennifer Aguirre-Malone said.
Like Beard, Fairview did have a small number of students return to campus for the first time during the pandemic, but classrooms were able to accommodate the additional desks, she said.
About 70% of Fairview students are taking part in the combined-cohort on-campus instruction, which is roughly the same as during the period of alternating cohorts, Aguirre-Malone said.
Modesto City Schools is doing all it can to accommodate students who want to be in classrooms, district spokeswoman Krista Noonan said Monday. “Our first priority has been to evaluate classrooms to see if there is a reconfiguration opportunity to fit more students, which has been done already at all of our sites,” she said in an email.
If there’s a situation where the number of students exceeds the classroom capacity, schools have the option to do an on-campus “hub rotation,” Noonan said. “In this case, a student may rotate into an on-site hub for no more than two days of a given week, and this hub would be supervised by a classified employee where the student would participate with their teacher via computer.”
No shortcuts, kids
At both Fairview and Beard, a lot of the safety measures are typical of public schools around Stanislaus County, including directional arrows, hand sanitizing stations, and Plexiglas shields on student desks, which have at least 4 feet of space among them. Cohorts of students stay together for instruction, recess and lunch.
Students who’ve been on campus quickly got the hang of following the arrows, the principal said, but for the time being, yard duty supervisors are escorting children to ensure they don’t take shortcuts. “We don’t want students crossing each other.”
Monday morning, the supervisors were working with kids in what they called a recess rodeo. They went over the rules and expectations for recess, lunch, arrival and dismissal. Students need to know where to go when they arrive at school, where they need to line up and where they eat breakfast, which is served to all at the same time, as opposed to staggered lunches.
The children also learn “what’s expected as far as social distancing and playing with the equipment during recess,” Aguirre-Malone said.
Unlike the reopening of junior high and high schools, the combining of cohorts was not dependent on Stanislaus County getting out of the purple tier and reaching the less restrictive red tier of the state’s COVID-19 risk monitoring system.
This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM.
