Wichita middle and high schools online only; elementary students have in-person option

Wichita public elementary school students will have the option of taking classes in person or online, but all middle and high schoolers will start the year online only. Sports and extracurricular activities will not be allowed.

The Wichita Board of Education voted 5-2 on Thursday, mostly following the advice of medical experts, to put the district in the orange zone of the reopening plan for the first nine weeks of the school year. The in-person and online classes start Sept. 8.

“The part that breaks my heart is the athletics — we won’t have them,” board member Mike Rodee said.

It was not clear if fall sports will be postponed or canceled.

“When I heard the doctors say very clearly tonight that we need to be in orange and our elementary kids need to be back in school, they were making that decision based on health,” said board president Sheril Logan. “I’m making that decision based on education, because I truly believe that we need to bring our elementary children back, and I’m hopeful that we can bring all of our kids that have chosen to do on-site back as soon as possible.”

The decision does not affect students enrolled in MySchool Remote or Education Imagine Academy, who opted to take classes online only. Parents still have time to change their enrollment option, though the virtual academy has hit its capacity.

Superintendent Alicia Thompson said about 60% of students enrolled in on-site classes and about 40% chose remote learning. There was no breakdown by grade level or individual schools. The district has about 50,000 students.

Teachers for MySchool Remote will be expected to work in-person.

Gating criteria for schools

The vote to place Wichita Public Schools in the orange zone of the gating criteria followed a separate 4-3 vote to use reopening guidelines issued by the Kansas Department of Education, with some modifications.

The decision will be in effect for nine weeks. A doctor recommended the decision should be for a shorter timeframe.

The state guidelines, which were issued last week, were presented to the board prior to Thursday’s vote by Dr. Paul Teran, a pediatric hospitalist. The group that created the guide included education experts and health care workers.

“We all come to these sorts of meetings with biases, and I wish there was a way we could get all kids back in school,” he said. “But I believe in this KSDE gating criteria. ... I that think this is the safest thing to do right now.”

Board president Sheril Logan said board members had never seen the state guide prior to Thursday’s meeting.

“These are new information to us,” Logan said. “We did not have this information nor these criteria on Monday when we met.”

Board member Julie Hedrick, who made the motion to adopt the state guidelines, also said the document was new to her.

Logan later said they did have the state guidelines on Monday, but that they did not discuss them. The full KSDE plan was not among the meeting documents provided to the public.

A school district spokesperson said KSDE gating criteria was included in Monday’s presentation, but that presentation only included one of the state’s five pandemic indicators. She did not answer why medical experts were not invited to Monday’s workshop.

“We were brainstorming in public, and nobody else in the world does that on live TV,” Rodee said of Monday’s meeting. “... Listening to the doctors, they were fantastic. This was the first time since we started this process that we had doctors come and talk to us, which was part of my anger Monday night.”

That meeting ended with most school board members apparently in support of allowing all sports and extracurricular activities to continue while just high school would be online only. That changed Thursday after medical experts spoke.

Reopening plans for schools

Between Monday’s and Thursday’s meetings, the school board spent about seven hours discussing reopening plans.

Teran suggested that the school board focus on three of the five indicators. The other two measure student absenteeism, which would be used to decide to close schools down after reopening, and hospitalizations, which are a lagging indicator.

The positive testing rate of 9.7%, as reported to the school board at Thursday’s meeting, is in the yellow zone. The latest data from the Sedgwick County Health Department had the rate at 10.2% which would be in the orange zone. That was the only indicator discussed at Monday’s meeting.

The two-week cumulative incidence rate is either 267 new cases or 180 new cases per 100,000 residents, depending on whether the numbers come from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment or the Sedgwick County Health Department. Both rates are in the red zone.

The trend in that rate appears to be stable, pending finalized data, which would be in the orange zone.

Board members that voted for starting the school year in the orange zone were Logan, Hedrick, Rodee, Stan Reeser and Ernestine Krehbiel. Ben Blankley and Ron Rosales voted against the motion. Blankley said he thought the district should start in the red zone, which would mean all students online only.

“I still remain concerned that there are pockets of our community that are doing unhelpful behaviors that are going to lead to our rates increasing rapidly,” Blankley said. “We have people that are seeking out bars and restaurants that maybe don’t enforce the mask order. We have folks that are creating gigantic birthday parties for extended family and they are all crowding inside.

“I really want to reiterate that that is not going to be helpful as we restart school, whether we are in a red, orange, yellow or even a green. It’s just not a smart idea right now. And it’s not smart for your family and friends, and it’s definitely not smart for all of the kids that we’ve got in our school district.”

Community testing and data

Dr. Rebecca Reddy, a pediatrician, said there is not an appropriate level of testing in the community.

“As a nation, we have failed abysmally to get resources out to medical providers to be able to test patients and provide protection for our community,” she said.

Schools in other countries have reopened successfully without large outbreaks, but they had lower community transmission with more contact tracing and testing, Teran said. Sedgwick County public health officials have said their staff are too overwhelmed with cases to conduct contact tracing.

The doctors acknowledged that coronavirus data is imperfect and said its limitations were taken into account when creating the gating criteria. Teran said that other states around the country suggest closing all schools when the positive test rate exceeds 10%, but the KSDE workgroup chose 15%.

“That’s because we’re not sampling enough people to have a good view of the percent positivity in our county at this time,” he said.

Blankley suggested adding a staff absenteeism number to the gating criteria in addition to a student absenteeism measure already in the KSDE guide. Logan suggested it was unnecessary because there are substitutes for staff.

Blankley also asked Teran if certain low-risk activities, such as golf, could go on while in the orange zone.

“When you’re in orange zone, I don’t see how you can prioritize extracurriculars and those schools activities without prioritizing getting kids in school for academics,” Teran said. “I know it’s really important — it was very important for me to play sports here at North High School. But it was also important for me to learn math and reading and the other extra classes I took.”

The KDHE has reported 16 clusters statewide at schools or daycares with 78 cases and one hospitalization. There have been nine outbreaks at sporting events with 67 cases.

A report to board members listed three employees from three different schools as testing positive between Aug. 13 and Wednesday with 70 new employees placed under quarantine during that time. There are 209 staff currently in quarantine. A total number of cases was not released.

Last week, it was confirmed that six Wichita schools had cases of COVID-19, but education officials said they did not have an accurate case count. Those staff members were infected outside of work, officials said.

“There have been some missteps and lapses to give teachers pause and concern about our readiness for accepting 50,000-plus students back,” said Kimberly Howard, president of the United Teachers of Wichita union. “And yet still teachers are eager to teach.”

Children younger than 10 years old seem to be less likely to transmit the infection, Teran said. They are also less likely to be severely affected by the disease. The child hospitalization rate is estimated to be between 0.2% and 8.8% and the child death rate is estimated to be between 0% and 0.6%.

The youngest COVID-19 death in Kansas so far was an 18-year-old patient.

Elementary students are also considered to be safer because they are easier to separate into smaller cohorts while middle and high school students often mix classes.

“All efforts should be made to get elementary students back on-site as soon as possible and in a safe manner,” Teran said.

This story was originally published August 20, 2020 at 9:51 PM.