“We realize it’s tough,” Wright said. “Everyone wants the school to start back so that they can get back to work. But we can only do so when we know we can protect everyone.”
The first date of classes for the upcoming school year was originally scheduled for Aug. 20.
“Our district is large and the community that we serve right now is dealing with a lot more cases and we feel like if we’re pro-active by pushing this date back, we’re going to protect a lot of people,” Wright said.
In making the decision to delay the start of the school year, Wright said administrators studied information from the American Academy of Pediatrics, documents from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) pertaining to re-opening safely and the guidelines for school re-openings formulated by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
“You can’t educate students unless everyone is safe and healthy,” Wright told the district’s board of trustees this evening. “We always had that at the forefront of our minds and so we wanted to make sure that the 21,000-plus students we’re going to serve and the 3,000-plus faculty members we’re going to serve and all of the people that they go home to will remain safe.”
The Sept. 8 start date means the school year will end June 16, 2021, Wright told the board.
“Because of our rising hospitalization rates and our rising mortality rates, we felt compelled to protect our community,” Wright said.
“We also decided that once we start on Sept. 8 we will be virtual because we want everyone to understand what that system looks like,” he said.
For those students who decide to return after the three-week virtual period, Wright said, “We’re going to do our very best to social distance, wear masks, sanitize hands — all the things the CDC asked for us to do.”
He also said “hot spots” are going to be inevitable and when that happens, the school(s) affected will have to return to all-virtual instruction and learning. He told the trustees that Texas Gov, Greg Abbott has walked back many of his original demands for school re-openings, especially in areas with high Covid concentrations. Hays County currently has 18.46 positive Covid cases per 1,000 population, a rate higher than Harris, Dallas, or Travis counties and twice as high as Bexar County.
“We will be giving parents and guardians the opportunity to chose whether they want to go in-person learning or virtual learning and we’ll be doing that by the (9-week) grading period,” Wright said. “That way we can staff appropriately and prepare master courses for kids appropriately.”
“We are going to make sure we are reaching out to all of our children with special needs to make sure they are getting the support they need,” the superintendent said. “We’ve talked about even making home visits or allowing certain groups of kids to come in where it’s safe so we can make sure they have the adaptive materials they need in order to be successful.”
He also said the district has contracted with the YMCA to extend its summer programs through Sept. 4. “That way parents have another option if they need to drop off their kids.”
Wright said Covid screening mechanisms will be in place when in-person classes resume. “We are going to ask when we return in person that everyone wear a face covering if they’re within six feet. We’re going to ask that each individual is responsible for their own face covering.”
However, he added, the district is supposed to receive personal protective equipment that can be used as replacements in the event a student’s face covering “breaks, or has tears in them or they cough in them and they need a new one.”
He said schools will be required to have supervised isolation holding areas in case “a kid has a fever once he comes to school or develops other symptoms” to try to prevent that student from infecting others. Plexiglass barriers are also being installed in all school reception, library and food service areas, he said. He said the district will be encouraging personal transportation to and from all schools because social distancing requirements would limit the number of students on a bus to no more than 14. When bus transportation is necessary, riders must wear masks and “ask that we only have one student per seat.” Students will be assigned seats on a school bus to facilitate contact tracing, the superintendent said.
Schools will not have meet-the-teacher events or open houses during the upcoming school year, Wright said. “We will try to the best of our ability to replicate a virtual model, but we’re not going to allow campus visitors just because it’s not safe. We’re going to encourage parents to drop their kids off. If they want to walk them, they can walk them to the front door and then say good-bye.”
“We’re going to shut down our water fountains this year, but there will be fountains available for water bottle filling only,” he said.
“We’re going to create staggered drop-off and pick-up times,” he said, adding that he will be working with other government agencies to lengthen the time electronic school zone speed restriction signs are in operation and also to extend school speed-restriction zones.
Noting that STAAR testing requires a student to appear in person, Board President Esperanza Orosco mentioned after Wright’s presentation that she hoped “our parents and our community (are) writing to their elected officials letting them know we should waive STAAR testing for the 2020-2021 school year because that is not in the best interest of our students.”
Trustee Meridith Keller told Wright she was “feeling very sad” as he outlined the protocols for the upcoming school year. “This is not what we want. This is not what anyone wants and I think we’re all going to need a lot of grace. This is going to get completely messed up, I’m sure. Things are going to go wrong. We will make mistakes – traffic going in and out of schools, pickups and drop-offs by people rushing to get to work and it’s going to be a mess. So everybody is going to need to give so much grace and be kind during this.”
Board Vice President Will McManus called Wright’s plan “well thought-out.”
“No plan is going to please everybody,” McManus said. “There’s going to be people who are upset about it or have different opinions but I appreciate that we are putting our students and our staff first and I think that’s the most important thing that we can do. I do feel like it’s very dystopian and I agree with Miss Keller that it’s very sad. I hope it’s as temporary as we can make it. I know we all want to get back to normal. We need to take these steps, but what a strange time we’re living in.”
You can read the school district's reopening plan here.
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