Richland middle and high school students may be online until January

Richland middle and high school students likely won’t be in class before January.

And the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in the Tri-Cities nearly led school board members to postpone this week’s return of third- through fifth-graders to elementary school classrooms.

Board members needed to vote twice on whether the remaining elementary school students would return this week, as part of the four-hour meeting. It came amid concerns that COVID rates were soaring rather than falling.

School board officials were presented Tuesday night with two plans, one to bring middle and high school students back by Dec. 7 and the other to wait until the end of the semester in January.

They did not pick either.

The differing safe return recommendations from state and local health officials is pushing board members to decide to set their own metrics for classroom returns. They plan to talk more about those at an upcoming special meeting Monday, Nov. 16.

The Washington State Department of Health continues to recommend waiting to move to hybrid learning until cases in the community are at 75 per 100,000 people during a two-week period.

Benton County had nearly 300 new cases per 100,000 people during the two-week period ending on Nov. 3. And the local health district leader maintains it would still be safe if strict safety guidelines are followed.

Each school district is being left to make its own decision.

Student schedules

Richland School Board President Rick Jansons said he didn’t want to pick a set date for middle and high schoolers to start and would rather base the decision on the amount of COVID transmission in the community.

While they did not set a date, potentially changing hundreds of secondary students schedules may be the issue that keeps students out of school buildings until the semester ends and class schedules change in mid-January.

While school administrators included a plan to bring back students in early December, they also don’t plan on making a decision on how to return kids to hybrid learning in the high schools until Dec. 8.

The district had a plan going into the school year with online, hybrid and normal schedules that was developed by administrators incorporating the plans of the classes students wanted and needed to take, said Todd Baddley, the assistant superintendent for secondary schools.

The problem comes when students transition back from remote learning to schools, he said.

There are potentially dozens of teachers who may not return to classrooms because they are in a high-risk category for getting seriously ill if they contract the virus.

The 13,000-student school district has seen 18 cases of COVID-19 in staff and students since the beginning of the school year. This has led to several students needing to be quarantined.

“That will require adjusting schedules, and in some cases, a lot of schedule adjustments,” Baddley told the board. “Our master schedule is not only built on student interest and student individual graduation credit, it’s also built with our staff members endorsement areas and some of those are highly specialized endorsements.”

The more staff and students who aren’t ready to return to the middle and high schools, the harder it will be to come up with schedules. For example, the district’s smallest middle school has seven staff members who are at-risk and one high school has 10.

Parent survey

In addition, in a recent parent survey, about 41 percent said they wouldn’t be comfortable with kids returning to school just after Thanksgiving. That rose to about 83 percent being more comfortable if students returned to classrooms after the end of the first semester.

“If we come back mid-semester, and (at-risk) staff can’t continue and we have to adjust schedules, .... one high school would have to adjust 500 student schedules another one would have to adjust 1,000 student schedules,” Baddley explained.

“That means kids having different classes, having different teachers and I shared some of that scenario with those student (leaders) .... two of them said, ‘Well let’s come back at the semester.’”

Others wanted to come back, but they didn’t want their schedules messed up. This was especially true for the seniors, Baddley said.

Board member Ken Gosney — the newly appointed member who was the former principal of Hanford High — supported waiting, saying that if they brought back students by early December there would only be 24 days left in the semester, and trying to reinvent the schedule at that point would only create more problems.

“We have the potential of taking an already difficult academic environment for kids and making it worse,” he said. “I know that kids want to come back, I’m not sure everyone really understands the impact.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 12:59 PM.