SALEM — While the city of Salem may be pulling out all the stops to keep people from trekking to town for Halloween to prevent the spread of COVID-19, things are actually looking up for the district’s schools.
Last week the Salem School Committee voted to expand and bring its younger and transitioning learners back to schools next month.
Pre-K, kindergarten and first and second graders will be invited back to schools for five days a week of in-person learning. Sixth graders and ninth graders will be offered a hybrid model with two days in-person and three remote at Collins Middle School and Salem High, respectively. All families will also have the option to continue completely remote learning if need be.
“After a long meeting on Monday night the decision was made that on November 16 we will be bringing back a group of students and returning them to school,” Superintendent Dr. Stephen Zrike said in a Facebook live meeting Wednesday. “At this point we do believe it is safe to return to school. All the metrics that we’ve looked at, the conversations that we’ve had with our local experts, with officials at the department of education, suggest that it is safe in Salem to return kids back to school.
“That doesn’t mean that there won’t be cases of positive students,” Zrike said. “It doesn’t mean that there won’t be the need to quarantine students and staff. But given the positivity rates that we see, the transition rates, currently we believe that it is safe for students to return.”
The current in-person model will remain similar to the remote one timewise, with the possibility to shift 30 or so minutes to account for travel. Eligible students will return to the classroom Nov. 16. The hope is for students to stay with their current teachers, but before the demand is determined that may not be possible.
“In many cases students who attend in person will have a slightly shortened in person day and will have up to an hour of remote learning to complete when they return home,” Zrike said.
Unfortunately, the current plan does not include in-person learning for grades three through five, seven and eight, and sophomores, juniors and seniors. Third graders especially are a grade Zrike and the district are hoping to see return as soon as possible.
“Third grade was always a grade that we had planned to bring in,” Zrike said. “But in order to maintain our health and safety standards right now, including smaller class sizes, physical distancing of six feet or more, it requires more educators to teach at each grade level. We’re concerned about staffing, and we want to wait until we can make sure that we can properly staff third grade.”
Either way the transition to expand in-person learning is something the district has been eyeing since plans for the year were originally made in August.
“I’ve believed from the start and continue to believe that there’s no substitute for in-person,” Zrike said. “Our youngest learners are struggling more than anybody else even though the (remote) experience has been positive for the most part. We do know that our younger learners struggle with navigating distanced learning. For that reason we feel like it’s essential and urgent to get our essential learners back to school and our students in transition grades that have never attended the school that they’re in. We want to make sure we help that transition.”
