The Kingston City School District entered the fourth quarter of the 2020-21 school year last week by bringing back more students to the classroom than at any time since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools back in March 2020.
During a virtual meeting of the Board of Education held on Wednesday, April 21, Superintendent Paul Padalino said the end of hybrid learning models and a return to in-person school doesn’t mean that COVID protocols aren’t being observed. And it also doesn’t mean that students who would prefer to continue learning remotely don’t have that option. But with fewer and fewer students choosing to stay home, the district is looking forward to finishing the school year with the majority of its students in the classroom.
Around 70 percent of students at the secondary level are back in the classroom four days a week, while roughly 82 percent of elementary school students in the district are in school five days a week. The superintendent noted that the fourth quarter was only three days old as of that evening’s School Board meeting, but he hoped they would have continued success moving forward.
“We’re monitoring attendance daily, we’re monitoring our bus ridership,” he said. “Obviously our safety protocols remain in place, and we’ve had some new enhanced safety protocols in place, including barriers, tents for outdoor class and dining options in our elementary schools…The students are in, and they’re happy. Teachers are happy, administrators are happy. Everyone’s happy to see things starting to roll.”
Padalino said that the district is looking into “enhanced safety for our students” by introducing a new COVID testing protocol to its schools. The district has included the teachers union in discussions with state education and federal health officials.
“We’ve had several meetings and we’re now into small work groups to create a plan where they will come in and assist us in testing our in-person students in all of our buildings,” Padalino said. “So again, adding that next layer of enhanced safety to our already, as we see, effective protocols.”
Trustee Priscilla Lowe asked about plexiglass dividers throughout the district, which she said had been falling down because they weren’t secured to desks.
“I’ve been in schools, and I’ve literally walked up to them and pushed on them and there is adhesive on the bottom that secures them to the desks,” Padalino said, acknowledging that in some cases the dividers had not been secured to desks. “There was some miscommunication and misunderstanding, but we’re communicating with our principals now to let them know they need to secure those to the desks.”
The barriers are up in elementary school classrooms even though they’re not required to have them there. Barriers are required in secondary school classrooms where desks are closer than six feet apart.
Beyond the practical challenges of returning kids full-time to the classroom, the district is also monitoring how in-person learning is affecting student achievement. The superintendent said he expects this data to coalesce as the fourth quarter unfolds.
“I think it will help us with a couple of things,” Padalino said. “It will help us understand maybe as we move into our summer and into even next September of gap closing, what we missed and where we missed it. I think it’s going to inform what we do moving forward…I think it will help us improve.”
But while the district is happily welcoming more students back into the classroom, Padalino said he doesn’t expect to be back to normal at least until sometime in 2021-22.
“I don’t think we’re going to be away from having remote learners in the Kingston City School District anytime in the near future,” he said. “I think we’ll probably go into next year (in September) with some students remaining remote learners. So I think (the fourth quarter of the current school year) will also help us improve our program and instruction for remote learners.”
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