SHAWANO, WI- COVID-19 data, concerns, and a new option for a hybrid version of the Shawano School District’s Blended model of education were discussed at the first meeting of the Re-Opening Committee held Thursday morning.
The committee was formed as a requirement of the school district’s approval of the school re-entry plan.
“Since this is an emotional issue, we have gone the spectrum of everything including that this is a conspiracy by the government, and we have had zero deaths in the county, so what are we worried about? Yet, on the other end of the spectrum, we have people who have not left their house yet,” School Board member Chuck Dallas told the committee. “We need you to be our eyes and ears.”
Superintendent Randi Anderson discussed some of the hurdles that she was hoping the committee would give her guidance on.
“Once it gets into our system, we are done,” Anderson said. How do we mitigate that so we don’t get it with our staff or with our students, but yet still provide an education,” she said, “With where we are as a district right now, based on this model, we are 100 percent virtual, so we are looking at this committee to ask, does this make sense?”
Anderson said her main goal is to bring the kids back, but she needs help, bringing up a topic that has been the center of some controversy.
“We want to be able to bring our kids back in, but I am going to flip this to the community and say you need to mask, you need to social distance, you need to cancel your county fair. We can’t have 68,000 people coming into this city and expect us to keep our buildings open. Sorry, we are all predicting if that county fair happens, we are going to be in a pickle. Let’s mitigate our risks so I can open.”
“Other communities have seen that the behavior of the community is important”, said Dr. Yu Chin Fang of Prevea Health in Shawano. “If you go to stores, how many people are masked, and how many are not? For me, I am extremely disappointed in how the community has not come together with masking and social distancing in order to send our kids back to school.”
“We are seeing more of a constant trickle of cases and some hospitalizations,” said Dr. Shannon Daun of the Menominee Tribal Clinic. “We are finding that testing is a huge limitation, so the numbers are probably worse than what we know.”
She says because of that, there are more than likely people who are positive that are not showing up on the map. “Part of school reopening plans include access to rapid testing.”
Dr. Justin Gilling of Gilling Dental in Marion said he stayed open for emergency care during the entire pandemic and he said he was seeing the worst. “Our profession is very sterile, but if it is going to be transmitted, it is going to be transmitted in my field. I don’t see a lot of cases, but I am not testing.”
Committee member Jess Huntington, a pharmacist expressed her personal feelings about the importance of kids going back to school.
“It is your duty to reopen because if we all shut down, where would this world go,” We have to stand up and give this a go and if we fail, then we can regroup.”
After hearing the comments from the committee members, school board member Chris Gull said what he was hearing was not the information he was hoping to hear.
“The whole idea of this committee was to give us better information and better data,” Gull said. “The board would have rejected the back-to-school plan if we did not have the formation of this committee. The fear-mongering is not giving us the data. At the end of the day, the school board is going to decide whether we open or close, so if you can’t provide us with that data, why are you in this committee. This is too important the parents have spoken and they want their kids back.
Gull compared what he was hearing to information that he has received about what kind of data other school districts are getting from their area medical professionals.
“They have medical professionals giving them good data and if our medical professionals can’t I want to know why.”
One request that Gull had was for more detailed information on how many cases are directly impacting the Shawano School District, not the county as a whole.
Vicki Dantoin, Shawano-Menominee County Health Officer said she can’t promise she is going to be able to provide an accurate number of how many cases are in the district.
“That will be when there is more activity in the school we will have more information available you have to think about where are the parents working? Are they working in Green Bay or Western Shawano County, so I think we need to look at the bigger picture,”
“So that means we should open then, Gull said. “Nothing has happened yet so let’s get our kids back and go from there. I wish the committee was a little more productive with helping provide the board the data, but I don’t think they are going to be,” Gull said.
Superintendent Anderson said while she wants the kids back and sees other districts doing so, Shawano being a bigger district has to compare apples to apples.
“We are one of the only districts that have but in their plan how we will move from one level to the other, so we are making connections. You cannot compare a Bonduel to a Shawano. Bonduel is a third of the student population at best so their ability to mitigate is different.” She added that the districts in Shawano’s athletic conference that are a similar size to Shawano are not going back five days a week. She said they are all looking at a blended environment or virtual environment due to the inability to mitigate.
A NEW PROPOSAL
Dr. Mindy Firmodig closed down the meeting by asking if it were possible to have a different model of learning in between blended (yellow) and virtual (red). She said there are certain groups of students that would be impacted in a negative way by going fully virtual.
“The most at-risk group of our students is our youngest kids,” said Dr. Firmodig. “If they don’t learn to read, everything two, three years down the road is going to be a risk and they are also the biggest risk to the economy because traditionally, those kids have two working parents and they can’t stay home alone.”
She also said the at-risk students at all grade levels who don’t have a safe home, good support or meals should also be included to be face-to-face as much as possible.
“Where instead of going from blended model all the way to virtual, this orange level would allow the elementary to still stay in person some of the time and also allow the high-risk students to be face-to-face.”
Anderson said she fully supported that model and would look into it for a proposal for the next school board meeting.
“So if that were the case, instead of being 100 percent virtual, we would be in a hybrid of a blended model.”
Firmodig said she feels that it is important to start the school year with some in person so they can get the school year off on the right foot.
“I am not in favor of 100 percent virtual right now and I like the idea of still bringing in our kids but are still able to mitigate. Right now we would be 100 percent virtual and for my little’s, that does not feel good,” Anderson said.
Anderson said they were hoping that the Department of Health Services was going to release their guidance as a decision-making tool to help the district look at the risks and will also be providing information on contact tracing as well as a cautionary statement against athletics, but those documents were not available for the meeting. It is believed that those guidance documents will be released early next week.
The school board will next meet on Monday.
Comments