Liam HalawithMaroon Echoes Editor-In-Chief The Mount Pleasant Community School District Board met on Monday night to discuss the governor’s recent education proclamation and what that means for their Return to Learn plan.
Governor Reynolds released a proclamation last Friday that stated that Face to Face instruction or in-person learning is the preferred method, and that at least 50% of a student’s educational time should be in a classroom. According to the district’s curriculum director Katie Gavin, school districts can not go into a remote learning only model without special permission from the state, but can go into a hybrid model with a rotational schedule. This means that if the district or a school building is suffering from an outbreak the school district can get special permission from the Department of Education to temporarily shut down and use remote learning to bridge the gap. The proclamation also states that a parent can choose for their child to attend remotely. However, the district is not required to provide remote learning for families who would simply prefer the remote option. This leaves the question, can a district provide remote learning as an option to everyone or only for those students with fragile health issues? The board believes that it would require more resources than they have. Not physical resources but teaching resources. Currently, the district has only one teacher per grade level in the elementary buildings running remote learning. In the secondary schools remote learning students will be assigned an academic online adviser who checks with them daily on top of their regular course work teachers. This option is only available for the few families and students that are of fragile health for now. Making the resource available requires only a few teachers just for online instruction and remote learning. One teacher can only effectively interact with about 5 kids before they are at capacity. Even 75 kids would overload the teaching staff. “If we were going to do that at a large scale, it’s going to take more teaching resources,” said Superintendent John Henriksen at the meeting. The board decided that they will survey for who would likely attend the program if offered before registration. So that they have better numbers to see if they are actually able to accomplish this. Henriksen asked if the board decides to entertain the idea of providing the option to families whether they would want to consider a cap to ensure teaching resources are not stretched too thin. The district is however obligated to provide remote learning services for students who are deemed of fragile health by a healthcare care provider. This meaning children who are themselves of fragile health or a parent or guardian is of fragile health. This is meant to ensure that those who are at high-risk for complications from the virus are not unduly exposed. The district has so far identified 10 families or 20 students that are of fragile health from school records, according to Ms. Gavin. This is a very manageable number for the district; however there could be a higher number because these do not account for parents or guardians who are of fragile health. “We will be ready to address the need [of students with fragile health], but if we’re talking about wholesale online remote learning, that’s at a larger scale and it’s going to take a bigger ramp-up than we had intended if we’re going to do it with high quality,” said Mr. Henriksen Again, this is all just discussion from the district’s work session on Monday. There will be one more work session before a final vote on the RTL plan at the regular August 10th meeting of the school board.
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