Excerpted from a longer article by reporter Erica Meltzer posted on Chalkbeat Colorado, August 21, 2020.
Outside a suburban Denver elementary school, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis bent his head for a temperature check before getting the all-clear to head inside and meet a small group of masked second-graders who were back in school for the first time since March.
He was at Village East Community Elementary School, part of the Cherry Creek School District, on Thursday to underscore a message he’s been pushing for months: Children need to be in school, and it’s safe for them to be there, at least as safe as anything is during a pandemic.
“There’s people that work in grocery stores every day, there are still cops out in the street, as governor I still have to do public events… but we’re doing it in a different way,” he said.
“And this is what we’re learning to do in our schools.”
Despite Polis’s encouragement, school districts that serve almost half of Colorado’s 913,000 K-12 students have chosen to keep students home, some for a few weeks, others for the entire first quarter. Even in school districts holding classes, tens of thousands of families have opted for remote learning as the coronavirus threat persists.
Colorado’s experience of school reopening has been a microcosm of the nation’s, marked by uncertainty and disparities. Students are facing wildly different educational experiences based on where they live. It’s not clear when students learning at home might get back in the classroom or whether students now in the classroom will stay there.
District leaders received inconsistent or vague guidance from state and local officials on how to open and no clear metrics for determining when and whether it’s safe to do so. In Colorado’s long tradition of local control, districts were left to weigh conflicting advice and political pressures, then craft reopening plans they hoped would keep students and teachers relatively safe and meet parent and community needs.
When COVID cases rose in the summer and public health officials issued dire warnings, school officials faced a kind of snow day decision from hell. They were looking at a complex forecast that stretched over weeks, not days — with lives potentially hanging in the balance.
When Colorado schools shuttered in mid-March as part of a broader effort to slow the coronavirus, parents rearranged their lives and educators scrambled to set up emergency online learning. Colorado’s shutdown worked. By May, new COVID cases were in steady decline.
But everyone from parents to pediatricians were dismayed by the cost that children paid for this success in lost learning, social isolation, and hunger. In public statements and on calls with school leaders, Polis said school would look different in the fall — staggered passing periods, no schoolwide assemblies — but children should be back in classrooms.
Public health guidance still put strict caps on gatherings. To keep class sizes small, some districts announced plans for hybrid schedules that would have students in school just a few days a week. These proposals sparked a strong backlash. How on earth were parents, including many public school teachers, supposed to work with children in school just a few days a week?
In an email to other metro area superintendents on June 1, Jeffco Superintendent Jason Glass raised a concern: More than half of parents in a district survey selected full-time in-person as their preference, despite a warning it might not align with public health recommendations.
“This is going to be a significant conflict with proposed A/B alternating schedule days or weeks proposals that we (and many other districts) are contemplating,” he wrote. And he wondered if the governor or public health authorities might provide clearer directives.
“In absence of that clarity, there will be tremendous desire/pressure to move toward a model with little or no social distancing included as a virus mitigation component,” Glass continued. “It may create a ‘race to the bottom’ once some district or school chooses to reopen school and have all their students in classes and buildings. The argument will be ‘see, they did it … why don’t you?’”
Polis did provide clarity, of a sort. In two calls, one with charter leaders and the other with district superintendents, the governor told school leaders not to worry about the 10-person cap on class sizes in official state guidance issued just a few days earlier. Instead, he encouraged school leaders to plan for relatively normal class sizes and rely on “cohorts” — groups of students and teachers who interacted only with each other — to limit the spread of the coronavirus within schools.
Some superintendents welcomed the news.
“This set the stage for a realistic return that is so good and needed for children,” Superintendent Lisa Yates of the Buena Vista School District in the Arkansas River Valley wrote in an email to Colorado Education Commissioner Katy Anthes after the call. Yates has called for treating schools as “essential” and allowing local communities to set their own conditions for re-opening.
Others expressed frustration at the shifting message. Superintendent Peter Hilts of the Falcon 49 district in Colorado Springs said in an email to Anthes that he’d spent weeks planning for one scenario, only to shift gears. Colorado’s open enrollment system would create pressure on districts to offer full-time classes if their neighbors did.
“I predict any district that opens up with less than a full schedule will drain students as parents look for full coverage so they can return to full work schedules,” Hilts wrote to Anthes in June.
Within days of the governor telling school leaders larger class sizes would be possible, the Mapleton and Westminster districts serving north Denver suburban communities announced they would hold classes five days a week. Districts that previously announced hybrid plans, including Denver and Jeffco, scrapped them, announcing plans for full-time, in-person learning, though parents could still choose an online option.
As Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova wrapped up a press conference in late June announcing the district would bring students back to school full time, she stepped aside to take a phone call.
“That was the governor,” she said a few minutes later. “He’s happy.”
Looking back, Roaring Fork Superintendent Rob Stein said he’s not sure if Polis’ push for full-time school influenced him or simply reflected back his own mood.
“We were all optimistic at that time,” he said. “We’d been disciplined about staying at home and the incidence was going down.
“But then over time it became clear we were going in the wrong direction.”
Through the first half of June, new COVID cases and hospitalizations continued to fall. Polis took steps to further open the economy, culminating in an executive order that allowed bars and nightclubs to open at reduced capacity on June 19. Polis took these steps even as he pointed to Texas and Arizona as cautionary examples. In reality, new cases had already started to increase, but it would not be apparent for a few weeks. Polis reversed course and closed bars again on June 30.
Through July, every COVID indicator in Colorado moved in the wrong direction. Case numbers, hospitalizations, and test positivity — the percent of people tested who get a positive result — all increased. Public health officials sounded the alarm: If Coloradans didn’t change their behavior quickly, the state’s intensive care units would be overwhelmed by September.
On July 16, Polis issued a statewide mask order, a step he had resisted for months.
“What is at stake is our children’s ability to head back to the classroom, where their education is better served,” Jill Hunsaker Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in late July. “We’re at a critical juncture in allowing that to happen.”
By the time Polis issued his mask order, plans for in-person school were already crumbling in some districts. Denver Public Schools was the first to make the call, just three weeks after announcing its intent to bring students back full time. On July 17, Cordova said all students would remain home until at least after Labor Day. She later delayed the start of in-person school until at least Oct. 16 for most students.
Following state guidance, Denver had built its reopening plans around keeping cohorts separated. But the district’s schedules, designed to meet an array of educational needs, created cohorts of up to 60 people at the elementary level and 120 at the secondary level.
Local public health officials who had urged a return to school balked at the large number of students and teachers who would be interacting every day, especially in a climate where cases were rising. Nor could they give the district a lower number it should aim for.
“It would definitely be easier to make decisions if we had stable conditions and guidance,” Cordova said. “It’s the reality that as the infection rates change, we change along with them…”
Read the complete article on Chalkbeat.org
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