CHAMPAIGN — The Champaign Unit 4 school district is considering plans to stay mostly remote at its three middle schools and two high schools for the second semester, according to a plan presented by Superintendent Susan Zola during Monday’s board meeting.
Both plans, though, provide more teacher-student engagement than an A-B schedule, where half of the students go to school in person each day, Zola said.
"Every time you do (an A-B schedule), you’re putting more kids in kind of a TV-watching mode, and you’re reducing the teacher-interaction time," Zola said. "It will take some selling, but at least the feedback I’ve seen, there are students that would like to come back and see their teachers, and we’ve seen that very positively with our Pre-K-5."
Under the plan, the middle and high schools would have an all-remote schedule every morning, and on Tuesday through Friday, they’d have buildings open for "in-person content-specific structured learning," Zola’s presentation said. The capacity for both high schools during the in-person learning sessions would be 300 students, which is less than a quarter of the enrollment at each school.
"I think it not only can be a space to provide academic support for teachers who are struggling, who need a little bit of extra help," Edison Principal Angie Schoonover said, "but I think at the middle-school level, we can be creative with providing even more enrichment activities for kids as well that they just haven’t had the opportunities to have."
Different students would be able to go to the schools at different times, and classes would meet in person at different times.
"I might be in AP Physics, and AP Physics might meet today, and I might be able to go in for AP Physics on Thursday at 2," Deputy Superintendent Laura Taylor said. "And then Algebra I and some of our core courses will probably run much more regularly for support for kids in those classes. It might not be with your regular class, but you might be in with 12 other students or 25 if we get them in a gym or somewhere. It’s unique. We’re going to try to pull this off. No, not everybody can come every day, but ideally, they can come when they see their schedules and can get support from teachers in your content area."
By the time middle and high schools return for the spring semester, the district should have easier access to testing.
The district planned on having school nurses prepared to administer tests when some students returned to elementary schools for in-person learning, but the district didn’t have the biohazard containers it needed, Zola said.
Those should arrive in time for in-school testing to be available for symptomatic teachers and students on Nov. 12, Zola said.
The current plan won’t allow students in the building as much as the proposed plan this summer, which was an A-B schedule. But it’ll provide far more for the students, Zola and her administrators seemed to agree.
"When we talked with our department heads and our teachers, it just came back loud and clear that the actual instruction, even as hard as it’s been this semester, would be even less next semester," Champaign Central Principal Joe Williams said. "Teachers felt very strongly that … maybe there’s not a great amount of engagement going on. But we knew that if students were simply logging on to watch TV lessons, which three-fourths of our students at any time would be doing, there would just be even less engagement. So we struggled with that.
"Quite frankly, I can tell you the schools that have the hybrid (A-B) model going on right now, they talk about that as being their biggest struggle."
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November 10, 2020 at 10:30AM
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Unit 4 proposes 'unique' plan for middle and high schools for 2nd semester - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette
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