But those hesitant parents will find a phalanx of educators — from the U.S. Secretary of Education down to their school principal — nudging them to return their children to a school building.
Determined to return to normalcy, leaders throughout Maryland are planning to open schools five days a week, 180 days a year starting this fall. And while they will offer an online alternative for some students, they see it as an option for a small minority who have proved they do better online or have medical reasons for not returning. In some cases, school systems may restrict the number of students allowed to learn at home.
But getting students back could take a public-relations campaign that would offer vaccinations to students, evidence of safety protocols and one-on-one discussions about a child’s chance for academic success.
“For the vast majority of students for whom in-person learning is safe and advisable, how do you coax them all back into classrooms? That is the fundamental question right now,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, a national network of education leaders.
Maryland education officials report just 45 percent of students in the state are back to in-person classes. So districts have to convince parents whose children have been learning from their bedrooms and kitchen tables for the past year that it is fine to commit to sending them to school.
Most school systems will offer parents an online option for the fall, but how accessible that will be to everyone who wants it and what form it will take is still up in the air. One thing that districts agree on is that having teachers providing both in-person and online instruction doesn’t work well.
For Baltimore, the discussion about online schooling will take place over several weeks of community meetings around the city where administrators answer questions about safety protocols and what parents want in an online option.
Now is not the moment to reduce the options for parents, according to Joe Kane, chair of the Parent, Community Advisory Board to the Baltimore school system. Most parents want their children back in school, he said, but the lower vaccination percentages and vaccine hesitancy in the city are concerns.
”I think they want that option just in case. I don’t think this is the time to start restricting those options when we haven’t gotten fully rid of the virus,” Kane said.
Community schools with health suites and school nurses should educate parents about school safety and vaccines and serve as vaccination centers, he said. That would encourage students to come back, Kane said.
Baltimore City was one of the first area school systems to inch back to in-person learning, beginning in September. Despite that and an aggressive COVID testing program, only about a third of students have returned.
“We are in a space right now where we are championing that students come back for in-person learning,” said Joan Dabrowski, the Baltimore school system’s chief academic officer. The system will begin to survey parents in the next two weeks to find out how many want to return in person.
While Dabrowski said some students excelled at learning online from home, the city school system believes students learn better in classrooms and that school is better for a child’s social and emotional well-being.
“We are going to have an application process” for those who want to continue to learn remotely, and each application will be reviewed with an eye toward how students have done in the past year working online. By the summer, Dabrowski said, parents will have to commit to having their children learn next school year online or in a school.
Baltimore County will be a bit more flexible, allowing parents to opt into virtual learning and then switch to in-person later, for instance if children under 12 become eligible to get vaccinated.
Howard County public schools closed the window May 5 for parents to commit to having their children learn entirely online next year or go back to their school. Only 2.5 percent of currently enrolled students are signed up for online classes next fall, according to spokesman Brian Bassett.
Parents might be excused for feeling a little whiplash. It was just a few months ago that some of them were arguing vehemently that their children should be back to in-person classes while school districts dragged their feet — making Maryland among the slowest states to reopen.
The question of whether students should be in school ceased to be a partisan issue when President Joe Biden, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and the president of a teachers union all came out in favor of a return to five-day-a-week, in-person schooling that looks as close to normal as possible. Their positions are now aligned with the Republicans who had fought to get students back sooner.
Magee of Chiefs for Change believes vaccinating students, upgrading ventilation and providing good COVID testing will be the keys to getting them back in school. That may mean, he said, school systems will face an unusual challenge. “Are you going to mount a huge campaign to make sure that all your middle and high school students are vaccinated? It is not easy and it is not what school systems were designed to do.”
Already, Anne Arundel and Baltimore County schools are offering vaccinations at some of their schools.
School administrators and teachers also will need to talk to parents about where their child stands academically and what has been lost during the pandemic. “You have to be transparent and accurate about what has happened to students. Parents deserve accurate information about their child’s pathways during the pandemic,” Magee said.
Maryland school districts still have logistical hurdles to overcome before they set up programs and schools for continued virtual learning. State law requires districts to get approval to create a new school for virtual instruction.
How the Maryland State Department of Education will handle these requests and what its role is in prescribing virtual instruction is unclear. MSDE officials declined to discuss the issue, saying in a statement only that they support a return to five-day-a-week in-person school.
In Harford County, school leaders sought and got the department’s approval for a virtual school under state regulations that govern such schools. Harford students who want to attend online classes will have to leave their local neighborhood school and enroll in a newly created virtual school, leaving behind friends and teachers, at least for this year.
In Baltimore City and Baltimore and Howard counties — all districts applying for state approval of an online program — students will remain enrolled at their regular school while attending a centralized online program. Teachers will be hired to teach specifically for the virtual school, and leaders in all of those school systems say not all the courses offered at in-person schools will be available through the virtual programs. Hands-on career and technology programs, for instance, may not be offered online.
Online programs tied to schools will allow students to participate in extracurricular activities at their regular school, district leaders said.
The Anne Arundel County system has not decided what online model it will use, but spokesman Bob Mosier said any online option will be offered only to students in grades three through 12. In Carroll County, where 74 percent of students are back, elementary students will have an online option with school system teachers. However, in secondary schools, online instruction will be contracted out and feature little live instruction.
Mary Boswell-McComas, chief academic officer in Baltimore County, said officials there believe the online schools and programs will survive past the pandemic. For some students, she said, online learning has allowed them to thrive.
Boswell-McComas said parents will begin to be able to express their preferences this month, but she believes many will feel differently about their children returning to school as time goes on this summer. An early survey to gauge family interest showed about 50% still interested in an online option in the fall.
“I think it is still really early,” she said. “Who knows where may families will be on August 10.”
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