On the recommendation of Superintendent Lindsey Hall, Mahomet-Seymour schools will remain in their current hybrid learning model until second semester.
The Mahomet-Seymour Education Association, who had surveyed their members, told the Mahomet-Seymour School Board that teachers overwhelmingly did not favor moving away from the plan the district is currently in.
Co-President Megan Jones said that the reasons for beginning in the hybrid model continue to exist, and while cases in Champaign County are relatively low, there are still hundreds of active cases each week.
Jones cited that 74-percent of the MSEA staff does not feel safe in moving ahead outside of the district’s current plan.
At the Sept. 21 board meeting, board member Lori Larson made a motion to move to a four-day a week, full-day option, keeping remote learning, as mandated by the state, as an option after the first quarter. That motion was voted down 4-3 with Merle Giles, Meghan Hennesy, Ken Keefe and Colleen Schultz voting no. Jeremy Henrichs, Lori Larson and Max McComb voted in favor of the motion.
McComb later motioned that the district would remain in hybrid for the rest of the semester, then move to four-days a week, keeping remote learning, as mandated by the state, as an option beginning second semester. That motion passed with Giles, Henrichs, Larson and McComb voting in favor while Hennesy, Keefe and Schultz voted no.
Hall was also in support moving forward with the plan for the second semester. Early in the meeting she stated that she wanted to board to approach the topic instead of continually having monthly meetings about what’s next.
“Equally as stressful as pandemic is also some issues with education,” Hall said. “We know this isn’t ideal, but in addition to that, is just the unknown, the uncertainty of what lies ahead, not having that information and not having a plan in place. I understand this is another source of stress so I don’t really have too much more to say about my recommendation.”
The Mahomet-Seymour School board received an update on how COVID-19 was affecting students, staff and the district on Sept. 14. District Nurse echoed Hall’s recommendation that the district needed to stay the course after almost a month of instruction.
To date, the district has had nine cases of COVID-19, including three positive cases since Sept. 16. Bachman said each case takes the district administration about four hours to do the necessary contact tracing with CUPHD and inform people that they have been exposed. One-hundred staff and/or students have been exposed since Aug. 19 when school began.
The district is following protocol such as having students wear face masks, quarantining exposed individuals and cleaning classrooms where positive cases have been identified.
Within the 61853 area code, COVID-19 active cases have remained around 10-15 for the last two weeks. As of Sept. 28, the 61853 zip code has 20 active cases. In total, the 61853 area code has 169 confirmed cases of COVID-19 since March.
Hall said that a vaccine for COVID-19 is unlikely to be approved prior to the second semester.
“We’re not going to be in phase five students so we have to figure out how to plan for and address some of the issues that we’re having,” Hall said. “I just think that we can’t continue to kick the can down the road.
“I know that January sounds like it’s really far away and it’s really not. If the direction that the board wishes to go, and the majority of the board wishes to go in person learning, there’s a ton of preparation that has to be done.”
Hall also asked to use Remote and Blended Remote Learning Planning Days, as made available by the state, in the fall to make a new plan for the board. She added that Mondays would need to remain asynchronous for the entirety of the school year so that teachers could continue to plan and do professional development.
“I am very, very concerned about how our kids are doing,” Hall said. “That is a great concern to me and I don’t just mean academically but I mean, emotionally and socially and the mental health aspects of a very strange schedule right now and not being able to socially through different relationships.
“I think what has to be put out there is that at some point, we’ve got to come back and get all our kids in school. If that’s the direction that the board wants to go, then we’ll work on that for the second semester. In my opinion, and this is my opinion, we can’t continue in the same mode until we get a vaccine. That’s not good for our kids.”
Hall said to do that right now, though, would take massive changes to the transportation plan and the lunch plan while families decide whether or not to keep their child in-person or in-remote learning.
Jones said as the MSEA broached the topic recently, the focus was on how safe teachers feel while at school, especially with a different model.
Larson said that it was time for the district to “increase your endurance” after having, what she felt, is a successful start with COVID-19 numbers.
“I feel like we are, we’re going to just settle,” she said.
Larson said that concerns about parents being able to provide for their families is also on her mind.
“I can’t have that on my conscience; I can’t,” she said.
Keefe said that he agrees that that district should not be in a place where there is an “on and off switch”, but would rather see the focus move to more of a “dimmer”. He asked if any consideration had been made in bringing students in on Mondays or extending the time K-5 students are in school each day.
Hall said that Mondays needed to continue to be for teachers to plan and learn, but also extending the day brings up issues, such as meals, which K-5 students are not eating at school right now.
Schultz said that the board should not ignore people who have come to the board expressing their concerns. She said that she read every email that the board received about the school plan, and she found that 60-percent of the people she heard from are in favor of keeping the hybrid plan in place while 40-percent prefer more in-person school.
“But I’m wondering whether we should think outside the box and see if we can think of ways to address some of the struggles that we hear people having in various ways, while still keeping the recommendation that the superintendent is making and the teachers are making and a lot of the public is making,” Schultz said.
“Is there another way that we might be able to solve that, without causing other problems and going against the recommendations that we have before us from our attorneys, our nurse, our Superintendent or teachers, and a lot of our public?”
Schultz’s inquiry was met with silence.
Henrichs said that the district needs to think about the emotional well-being of the students, especially those in junior high and high school who, he said, could be falling behind.
“It’s not possible to continue this and provide an education that is appropriate,” he said. “I think every year is important, but I think juniors and seniors, especially the importance of these years are huge; you don’t get you don’t have five or six more years to get back up.
“I know that some of the national testing (SAT and ACT) has been put aside by some of the universities, but that’s not going to be forever. So I think there’s going to be some downstream effects for some of our high school students. Junior high, high school students, those adolescent teenage years where some of that social emotional is so huge as well. And there’s already a huge struggle with mental health.”
Giles supported Hall’s recommendation from an operational side, then voted for the second semester change, knowing that the district would have time to plan.
Hennesy said that the arbitrary date of Jan. 1 does not mean that the virus will subside or that the pandemic will be over.
“I don’t know that we need to take any action to change unless circumstances change,” she said. “And I have not read anything or any indication that they anticipate January, shift and recommendations.”
Early that evening at a Mahomet-Seymour town hall about social emotional learning, inclusion and diversity, the idea of pivoting ran through the conversation as a theme. Hennesy said that the district needs to adapt a pivoting mentality with COVID-19, too.
“I believe that can address some of those issues, but it’s going to require some kind of shift,” she said.
Hennesy, like Larson, said that she had visited the schools, at Hall’s suggestion, and realized that the junior high and high school already had classrooms that were not able to follow the six-foot social distancing guidelines with students who were in school two-days a week now. Larson reported that with some classrooms having cleared out all additional items, social distancing was obtainable.
With 74-percent of teachers stating that they did not feel like expanding the plan was safe, Hennesy said that she would have to vote against anything that they did not support.
“In my tenure on the board, I have had other board members, members of the community, parents, Superintendent, teachers come and say to us, ‘We are the experts who need to trust us.’”
Keefe said that he was not willing to move outside of the direction the distinct has received from state, local, and federal authorities, public health authorities.
“I can’t support an option that is going to ignore those experts,” he said.
“The wellness of our students and our staff and taking care of our people, that comes first, but we also have to pay attention to the liability issues and they are significant. And they are very concerning for me.”
McComb said, though, that by voting on a plan for second semester now would give families and staff a chance to plan for changes in the future.
“I think the community needs to know where we’re headed so they can plan their lives with their families,” he said. “I think teachers need to know where we’re headed so they can figure out where they’re at in this. I think administrators need to know where we’re gone so they can figure out what we need to look really good at.”
McComb said the district needed to look at large monitors so that teachers could see all remote students at home and Plexiglass boxes for staffing.
Larson and Keefe said that the district should continue to look at large spaces in the community to help with school. Keefe said that might help with some of the connectivity issues people have stated.
Schultz raised concerns that the district may see a decrease in families willing to send their child to school with an expanded in-person said. She worries that the parents who feel safe with their child in school right now will pull their child, leaving fewer students with the opportunity to have some in-person interaction.
