The Flagler County School Board today signaled support for a request from Superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt to push back the return to school from Aug. 10 to Aug. 24 for students, and either a week’s or two week’s delay for faculty and staff, depending on finances and other metrics.
The school board will almost certainly approve the delay at a special meeting scheduled for 3 p.m. on July 28.
The surging Covid-19 numbers have little to do with it, at least not directly, though the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the reason for the slew of non-traditional contingencies at work. Rather, Mittelstdat wants to give school staff time to train and adapt to the non-traditional approaches, and give administrators time to balance out staffing needs, with up to 40 percent of students choosing one form of remote instruction or another.
“We are planning for things we never realized we would,” Mittelstadt told the school board in a workshop this afternoon, after board members were briefed on the 40-some percent of students who may be opting for remote instruction. “The process for our staff needs time to evolve, and there’s articles within our contract that we must be honoring as we do that, so I would like consideration from the board, it would require board approval, to delay the start date by 10 days.”
Board members raised various questions, but at least four board members, with the exception of Chairman Janet McDonald, support the delay, if in some cases for different reasons. McDonald didn’t voice opposition, but raised the most questions about the feasibility of the plan. She doesn’t want students cheated of time or rushed through their calendar, and wasn’t clear on how the delay would not subtract instructional days from students’ calendar.
But there will not be a loss of instructional time, only a shift, and the semester would not end in December, but in January, Diane Dyer, the director of curriculum and instruction, said.
As of now, St. Johns County is delaying its opening to Aug. 31. Volusia and Putnam Counties are delaying their openings two weeks. Many counties across the state have announced delays as Florida became the national epicenter of the Covid surge after the June 5, Phase 2 reopening of the economy, with numbers accelerating upward in July. Flagler’s positive cases have surged to nearly 700, cumulatively, with over half recorded since July 1. The county has seen 10 Covid-related deaths, including two non-residents. On Tuesday, the county told some parents and students that a Matanzas High School student athlete had tested positive.
The district is offering three options for students and parents: traditional, in-person instruction at the district’s nine schools; virtual instruction through iFlagler, which dovetails Florida Virtual School’s approach (it’s not live instruction, but online instruction supervised by teachers who can be reached frequently); and in what the district is calling its third option, streaming instruction from the classroom, allowing students to remain at home and follow daily courses as webcast live from their teacher’s classroom.
Some 1,300 students have confirmed attendance through iFlagler. Last year, iFlagler accounted for 55 students. Another 2,100 students are opting for the third, remote option. And 1,160 students are “in limbo,” Dyer said: they requested information about iFlagler, but may shift between iFlagler, the remote option or even the in-person option. About 800 of the district’s 13,000 students attend Imagine School at Town center.
Subtracting all those numbers from the traditional model leaves less than 60 percent attending the district’s five elementary schools, its two middle schools and its two high schools–a diminution the district is encouraging.
“If we could have 40 or more percent that are not coming to campus,” School Board member Andy Dance said, “that helps us with the social distancing, that helps us with the different seating arrangements and smaller number of students on the buses and everything else.”
“That should be the story,” Board member Colleen Conklin said. “I think that should be the message we’re pushing to families, reserving almost those seats in the classrooms for those families that have to go to work, those children that really remote learning didn’t work for, our ESE population, and just try to drive the numbers that are actually on campus, down.” ESE is exceptional student education.
At 4 p.m. outside the Government Services Building, where the board was meeting again at 6, parents and students gathered in cars for a “motor march” demonstration protesting the reopening plans–before the board had signaled its willingness to delay the reopening. The motor march was one of many organized in the state. It was organized locally by Christine Patterson, a former Flagler County teacher who started Flagler for a Safe Return to Campus.
“Data and science tells us that it is not safe to return to campus,” Patterson said, referring to numbers reported by the health department. “If schools are to be data driven with our instruction, they should be data driven with our safety.” She added: “Right now the best measurement we have is not returning to campus unless there are 14 days of no new cases in the county. If a plan doesn’t outline in detail how to handle an inevitable outbreak why are we returning to campus?”
Mittelstadt addressed the board about reopening plans (and delays) after inviting her executive team to join board members at the board table. (The board members were socially distanced. The executive team was not. Nobody wore masks.)
“The suggestion coming from you is extremely important to me only because your team has been working behind the scenes on the logistics,” School Board member Andy Dance told Mittelstadt. He said a lot of the issues can be worked out, from supplies to “in-limbo” parents. He said the proportion of students opting out of traditional school settings will help with transportation and other settings where social distancing must be accommodated.
The board did not consider approving the plan today because Mittelstadt first needed to be sure she had the board’s support before assigning the Calendar Committee to work out the scheduling details, and before continuing negotiations with the teachers union and the service employees’ union on the new arrangements. After its workshop, the school board held a strategy session behind closed doors–an allowable exemption to the open meetings law, as long as the board is discussing legal strategy, bargaining strategy or confidential security matters. Expulsion hearings involving students are also confidential.
The unions sent a lengthy memorandum of understanding to the board, outlining its concerns and proposals on how to reopen schools safely, though the local unions are also indirectly part of the state Florida Education Association’s lawsuit against Ron DeSantis, filed on Monday, seeking to stop the reopening of schools. The unions consider the approach unsafe.
Katie Hansen, president of the Flagler teachers union, said the most-favored approach is remote instruction on last spring’s model, because Option 3 as currently proposed raises concerns. “FCEA has expressed significant concerns about this third plan with remote learning in terms of having cameras in the classroom, because that brings some unforeseen consequences,” Hansen said.
“I want the district to be cautious,” Hansen said, looking at the larger picture. “If we’re still unable to do many things like go to a restaurant at full capacity, why are we considering doing this with students? I worry about my teachers who have underlying health conditions, my teachers who are over 55,” as well as students who have underlying conditions, she said. “Maybe it would behoove us to push the start date a few weeks or a month, or start with virtual learning.”
Hansen has kept in close contact with Mittelstadt, she said, who has been accessible and as perplexed as teachers.
But during the workshop, there was not much clarity about the looming question: what happens if the surge continues?
“My concern would be, where does this conversation go in two weeks?” Conklin asked. “We’re talking about basing decisions on local data. For the last seven days, looking at that data, we’ve seen almost 20, 25 cases, new cases, per day. I guess the question is: while you’re looking at an opening date of the 24th, has there been conversation around–if the data continues to move in the wrong direction.” She asked if the district was considering such questions as virtual instruction exclusively for the first nine weeks.
“I don’t want to have this based on Covid numbers,” Board member Trevor Tucker said, “because based on Covid numbers, let’s say it flattens out and then spikes, are we going to stop school? Like, that’s too much unknown. To me, now if it’s because hey, we have all these additional things that we don’t have worked out. I’m OK delaying it 10 days, but if it’s going to be based on Covid numbers which are unknown and they can change throughout the year, I’m not OK with that.”
“We can debate the numbers all we want but at some point we should be looking at data,” Conklin said. “The biggest problem we have right now are all the questions around the validity of some of the data we’re looking at.” But that’s why she wanted to know if the questions about a plan B are being asked.
Mittelstadt said the various plans, including an all-virtual approach, have been studied in concert. “All along we’ve been working since March on, if we had to do all school-based distance learning, we can flip that switch, we can do that,” the superintendent said. “We’re not prepared to go there yet. We will if we have to. But right now it’s about getting school started with all of our kids by the 24th if there’s consideration for allowing continued work moving in the right direction and getting our teachers ready.”
