Jeffco Public Schools and Westminster Schools share a border and, it stands to reason, their leaders share the same concerns for their students, families, teachers and support staff.
But as Westminster prepares to return to in-person learning Monday after two weeks off, Jeffco Schools will send all students in grades 6-12 home to go remote starting the same day after they attended in-person classes for much of the Fall. Younger grades in Jeffco will spend another four days in class before they too head to the laptop.
Douglas County made a similar decision Thursday, moving all students to online classes after Thanksgiving break. Mesa County's District 51 also moved high school students to online learning while promising a decision on other grades by the end of the month.
In the absence of timely guidance from the state about best practices to follow in getting kids back to class this fall, Colorado’s K-12 schools are a discombobulated hodgepodge of approaches, with different rules, different metrics and very different calendars for the academic year.
“That's a reflection of how education in this state is run in general,” said James Duffy, the chief operating officer of Westminster Public Schools, which resumes in-person on Nov. 16 after a two-week remote session amidst a spike in cases. “So this is just one more example of sort of that patchwork approach we take to education here in the state.”
State health officials have largely left districts around Colorado to figure it out for themselves — even codifying a couple of weeks ago that school districts can pretty much do whatever they want in consultation with their local public health agency.
Weeks after several districts, including Jeffco, returned to in-person learning, the state finally provided basic guidance on how to handle outbreaks. But there are no statewide standards on when to start, when to go remote, how to handle pick up and drop off, and sports.
“A lot of the school district work, of course, is done at the county level, and the state level is participating in the conversations,” said Dr. Eric France, Colorado’s Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Public Health and Environment. “The decision, though, on opening and closing are local in that regard.”
Just Wednesday, 10 days after Westminster moved to remote learning among increasing caseloads and as they were preparing to return to classrooms, CDPHE issued a new report including data on outbreaks that had occurred in schools so far this year. But the report, which said maybe districts should think about curtailing extracurricular activities, still emphasized that the decision belongs to local districts.
“CDPHE’s data suggests that K-8 schools, when implementing public health mitigation, have been able to provide a reasonably safe in-person learning environment,” the report said. “Data suggest that there is a lower risk to have in-person learning for grades K-5, a slightly higher risk for grades 6-8, and grades 9-12 are at the highest level of risk.”
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November 13, 2020 at 06:00PM
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With Limited State Guidance, Colorado Schools Take Many Different Approaches To Learning In The Pandemic - Colorado Public Radio
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