The Kingston school district may have selected its solution to pre-college education in the time of the pandemic, It may reopen schools for students in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade this fall, with students in seventh through twelfth grades studying off-campus by enhanced remote learning.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who will officially announce how school will look statewide some time in early August, has required school districts to submit reopening proposals. Plans must include how to deal with the Covid 19 pandemic at the local level in order to keep students, staff and the community at large as safe as possible.
Kingston school officials began touting their proposal last week with a series of online town hall meetings chaired by schools superintendent Paul Padalino, who stressed that the path that would be taken was not actually up to individual school districts. They were only being tasked with formulating plans for the 2020-21 school year to begin either in-person, by remote learning, or through a combination of the two.
“We are really not in control here,” Padalino said during a remote town-hall presentation on Thursday, July 23. “This is going to come down from the governor’s office whether we open or do not open based on the metrics set forth by his [reopening] phasing plan. We are operating in the way we’ve been instructed to operate. We’ve been told to put together this plan, to have three options, and to engage in in-person education for our students as much as possible when we can, given the status of our community.”
In a recent enumeration, there were more than 30 active Covid 19 cases within the Kingston district’s boundaries.
Spreading out the students
To ensure social distancing, students in grades K-6 attending in-person classes would be spread out across all ten district school buildings, including M. Clifford Miller and J. Watson Bailey middle schools, and Kingston High School. A staggered arrival and study schedule would allow social distancing on buses and prevent overcrowding at school entrances.
Padalino stressed that the district’s delivery will be an improvement based on lessons learned during the last three months of the 2019-20 school year, when the remote learning rollout had to come together quickly.
“We feel that we learned a lot in the spring,” said Padalino. “We had to jump into it quickly. It wasn’t done perfectly, but we did learn a lot, and we’re applying what we learned as we move into the fall.”
Also learning in-person under the proposal would be students in grades 7-12 who are English language learners (ELL), or those with individualized education programs (IEP) that requires more direct learning. The superintendent said that attending in-person classes would make it easier to ensure equitable education for younger students in the district.
Meaningful interaction
Students in grades 7-12 would see greater opportunities for individualized learning. “We’re working hard to make sure … every student has meaningful interaction with their teacher on a daily basis when we’re online,” Padalino said. “We’re making sure that students have the technology they need on hand when we’re online learning. And we are working with different organizations to try to increase our Internet access for all of our students, whether it be through our own hot spots, community hot spots, or working with cable companies.”
As in the spring, underprivileged students who are remote learning will have access to tablets enabling them to connect with lessons and submit work each day. “We’ve made many changes that are more education-friendly and user-friendly for students and parents,” Padalino explained. “We are going to continue to solicit input from our community and our classroom teachers to find out what’s working, what’s not working, and how we can fix it.”
Meanwhile, on-campus study would look different should the proposal come to fruition than it did up to the middle of March, the last time students were allowed into the classroom. Students and staff will wear masks consistently and have daily health screenings. Daily cleaning and disinfecting will occur in classrooms and with any books or materials that might be shared. All students in grades K-6 will be assigned to a single classroom with one teacher and appropriate teaching assistants or support staff. And in-person students will have a still undetermined physical education program that will ensure social distancing.
Padalino said that the proposal that will be submitted to the state by Friday, July 31 will also include details about where students in grades K-6 will attend school.
“Not all of our K-6 students will be in their home school,” Padalino said. “We are looking at how to utilize all ten of our buildings; with 7-12 being home in online learning we have two middle schools and the high school available to us for K-6…We may move certain grade levels at a time, or certain (attendance) zone areas.”
Some parents opt out
Roughly 2000 parents and guardians have responded to a district-wide survey asking if they’d support sending their children to school this fall: Padalino said that between 18-20 percent of those who responded said they would have their students remote learn from home regardless of the district’s plans.
The district will also submit alternative plans for a full return to class across all grades, as well as for a full remote-learning scenario. The superintendent did not state a preference among the three options. The district still had to prepare each of its proposals as though all eligible students were returning to the classroom. “We would rather plan for everyone to come and have too much than plan the other way and not have enough,” he said.
The New York State Education Department and local boards of health likely to impact how education proceeds from September onward. The preference, he added, would be a return to school as it was from last September through mid-March, provided of course that it was totally safe to do so.
“We don’t know how long it will last,” Padalino said. “This is our start-up plan. As far as whether we come out into a full, normal school year with 100 percent of our students attending 100 percent of the time, we don’t know when that will happen …. That is a decision that will be made in Albany. That will not be a decision made here.”
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