by Marty Green ·
Wednesday, August 19, 2020
At both Hildreth Elementary School and the Bromfield School, a substantial majority of Harvard families have chosen to let their students go back to classrooms this fall. Families were asked to tell the district by Aug.14 whether their children would return to school for in-person classes or stay home for a remote-learning program. Not quite all families met that deadline, but by the School Committee’s Aug. 17 meeting, Superintendent Linda Dwight was able to estimate how many students would likely return for in-person classes.
Not surprisingly, families were more likely to choose remote learning for elementary school children than for older students. Dwight said about 30% of HES students would be staying home and relying on remote learning. For Bromfield students, that share was less than 15%. At both schools, nearly all the remote-learning students wanted to stay within the district, taking online classes with Harvard teachers. Only 1 or 2% at each school planned to withdraw from the district to take a different remote program or switch to home schooling.
Step by step, the School Committee and administrators have set increasingly specific plans for reopening Harvard’s schools next month in the face of challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The full School Committee has met weekly since July, with several subcommittees also meeting each week. Teachers and administrators have likewise spent much of summer “vacation” planning ways to hold classes safely and make online teaching effective.
By a narrow vote Aug. 10, the School Committee chose a plan that partially reopens schools for in-person classes after Labor Day, instead of a plan that would have relied on remote teaching for all classes. The vote was 3-2, with Chair SusanMary Redinger and members Suzie Allen and Abby Besse supporting the decision. Members Shannon Molloy and Sharlene Cronin favored an all-remote learning model.
One or both schools would switch to fully remote learning if school administrators and the committee decide an uptick in local coronavirus cases warrants doing so. Remote learning also remains an option for all families that decide to keep students at home at any point in the year.
More than 90 people attended the meeting via Zoom to hear the committee’s decision. The half-dozen people who spoke in the public comment periods all strongly favored keeping students at home for fully remote learaing, even as they praised the effort and planning the committee and school administrators had put into the hybrid model.
At their Aug. 17 meeting, School Committee members continued to tweak reopening plans to take into account both educational concerns and logistics such as transportation. They also approved two new COVID-specific policies. One requires everyone in school to wear a mask except at designated outdoor breaks or with an approved medical exemption. The other policy sets Oct. 9 and Nov. 20 this year and Jan. 4, 2021, as the dates when students in the remote-learning program can choose to move back into in-person classes.
The plan the committee approved is called a hybrid model, which was the one recommended by Superintendent Linda Dwight. Students at both Hildreth Elementary School and the Bromfield School can attend their morning classes at school, return home for lunch, and then take afternoon classes via computer. While the basic plan applies to both schools, there are significant differences between the schedules for HES and Bromfield.
The first phase of the hybrid plan will last at least until Oct. 9. At both schools, in-person classes will be limited to four days a week—Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday classes will all be held remotely, and the school buildings will have a thorough mid-week cleaning.
Elementary students will start school Tuesday, Sept. 8. They’ll attend school four days a week, for roughly the same hours that applied on early release days in previous years. No lunch will be served at school, but kids will have two snack breaks, and take-home lunches will be available to students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. After eating lunch at home, elementary students might have remote afternoon classes in art or music, or they might have online guidance for activities that were assigned earlier by their classroom teachers.
Bromfield students will start Wednesday, Sept. 9. All Wednesday classes will be remote, but they will include all students in the section. So the Sept. 9 start will allow all students to meet their new teachers on the same day. On the other four weekdays, each grade will be divided, with half the students attending in-person classes Monday and Thursday and the other half on Tuesday and Friday. The division will keep classes small enough for students to be a safe distance apart in classrooms. All students (in-person and remote) will have five classes before breaking for lunch about noon. Then those who have been attending school in person will go home, and both groups will have a remote class session in the afternoon.
Both options raise concerns among students
Before the School Committee’s vote to support the hybrid plan at the Aug. 10 meeting, several Bromfield students presented results from their own survey of students going into grades 6 through 12. According to senior Taylor Caroom, who presented some of the results, about three-quarters of those students said they preferred the hybrid choice and felt very safe in going back to school. But nearly all believed the school would have to resort to remote learning at some point because of more COVID-19 cases.
Despite their willingness to return to in-person classes, most Bromfield students also expressed a number of concerns, as summarized by seniors Brooke Caroom, Maible Daly, and Felicia Jamba. Many students said they weren’t confident that their peers would take the risks of the virus seriously enough to follow rules about wearing masks and maintaining social distances. They also worried about risks to their family members and teachers.
The possibility of all-remote learning sparked a different set of student concerns. While they agreed remote learning was very safe, many thought it involved too much screen time and allowed less access to teachers. About two-thirds of those surveyed expected online attendance would be poor, and some also feared that courses they hoped to take might be unavailable.