Pasco is sending all students back to classrooms. But their days won’t look the same

Pasco elementary students will spend the entire day in classrooms starting Monday, and middle and high school students will be back in-person in February.

The school board unanimously agreed late Tuesday on a series of schedule shifts that will extend the day for elementary students and reopen schools for older students.

While school board members were concerned about schedules that would bring middle school students back for less than six hours a week, they didn’t have any problems with the timing of their return.

The high school schedules are similarly short since the schools are not comfortable serving lunches in the buildings.

Pasco is the largest and final Tri-City school district to agree to reopen middle and high school classrooms after Dr. Amy Person with the Benton Franklin Health District recommended beginning to reopen them.

Kennewick and Richland middle school students started returning this week, with students attending part of the week in person and part of the week online.

Elementary schools throughout the area already have been open with various hybrid learning models.

The Washington state Department of Health loosened its guidelines on school reopenings if districts show static or dropping case rates in the community.

The state guidance also says areas with more than 350 cases per 100,000 people over a two-week period should stick to elementary students in classes of 15 or less. Franklin County had 636 new cases during the two weeks ending on Jan. 19.

Dr. Person said that the guidance is placing less importance on case rates and more importance on trends, and that the rate of COVID has been declining in the Tri-Cities area.

The recommendation brought complaints from some teachers who felt it is too soon to return to classrooms. Many of them noted that many parents are not comfortable sending kids back.

Surveys and schedules

Pasco schools are finding themselves in a unique situation in the Tri-Cities with an average of 25 percent of its elementary students opting to stay in distance learning even after classrooms reopened.

The highest percentage was at Marie Curie STEM Elementary where 47 percent of the students are opting not to return.

Administrators are planning that about half of the middle and high school students will remain learning online, and have sent a survey to parents offering three options: Send children back for hybrid learning, stay in distance learning or enroll in the district’s online academy.

Surveys are due back Friday. District leaders will spend the next two weeks shifting classes to make sure there are enough teachers to serve all groups.

Hybrid students in both middle school students will spend from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in the schools twice a week. They will return home for online lessons and a “related arts” class. Those classes can include arts, music, industrial technology or family and consumer science.

The short schedule brought concerns from school board members who compared it to schools in Kennewick and Richland which were offering students much longer days in class.

Jenny Rodriguez, the district’s executive director of teaching and learning, said between the time in the classroom and the time students are spending with direct instruction using Zoom, students are getting to interact with teachers the same amount as other districts.

“With this proposed schedule, our kids are getting two hours and 50 minutes a day,” board member Scott Lehrman said. “From a lot of people who want to send their kids to school they’ve voiced that (online) learning may not be as efficient for their children as the synchronous, in-person learning. What would we say to those people?”

Administrators agreed to see if they can shift around the schedule to provide more time in schools, but it is uncertain how much of a change they will be able to make.

Board members Steve Christensen and Jesse Campos believed district administrators did the best they could do to come up with a workable plan.

“I know that in-person instruction is the best, but given that we’re in the middle of COVID pandemic, I don’t think we can do what we want to do,” Campos said.

High school students will face a similarly shortened schedule.

Students receiving in-person instruction would start as early as 7 a.m. and finish at 11 a.m. two days a week.

Students choosing distance learning would get Zoom classes from 1:05 p.m. to as late as 3:40 p.m., four days a week.

Ninth graders will return on Feb. 22, and the remaining students will come back on March 1.

This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 12:58 PM.