With most Wichita students preparing for in-person classes, school board meets again
Wichita’s school board will discuss the coronavirus pandemic again Monday, offering one more opportunity to review the decision to send most upper-grade students to in-person hybrid classes as COVID-19 indicators worsen.
The Board of Education will meet at 6 p.m. in the North High Lecture Hall, 1437 Rochester. It will not be open to the general public because of the pandemic. Online streaming is available through WPS-TV.
The last item on the agenda is a discussion with medical professionals from the Kansas COVID Workgroup for Kids.
“I wish there was a way we could get all kids back in school, but I believe in this KSDE gating criteria,” Dr. Paul Teran, a pediatric hospitalist and a member of the state work group, told the school board in August.
Monday’s meeting will apparently be the first time since the August meeting where members of the work group that developed the state’s reopening guide will speak to the board. Sedgwick County’s health director spoke to the board on Oct. 30.
The school board decided on Oct. 20 and reaffirmed on Oct. 30 that elementary students would continue with the current education model for the second nine weeks, which starts Monday. That meant students would stay with either in-person or online, whichever their parents chose prior to the start of the school year.
Meanwhile, middle and high school students who chose to start the year online will stay online. But students who were forced to take online classes after choosing in-person will now transition to a hybrid or blended model starting Thursday.
The district has not specified exactly how many students would be returning to school buildings, though administrators have estimated it at around 60% of students.
The hybrid plan lets half of those 60% attend in-person on Mondays and Tuesdays while the other half go to in-person classes on Thursdays and Fridays. The other three days of the week are online learning days.
Students and parents do not have the option to change their decision on learning models. However, athletes who are signed up for in-person classes apparently must choose whether to participate in their sport and stick with online classes or to go in-person and quit the team.
‘Kids need to be in school’
Monday’s meeting offers the school board one more opportunity to review their decisions as various pandemic indicators spike in the Wichita area and statewide. The decision to keep the hybrid plan for upper grades was reaffirmed by a 4-3 vote.
“I’m letting my heart lead me into saying I think kids need to be in school, if their parents have chosen for them to come to school and are willing to take the risk factor of them being in school,” board president Sheril Logan said at the Oct. 30 meeting. “We have done yeoman’s work, and I think the fact that we have 167 staff and 107 students out of 41,000 students and almost 8,000 or 7,500 staff, that’s a pretty small percentage.”
The district estimates its staff count at 7,308 people, and enrollment was recorded at 47,230 students.
In the week since the board’s Oct. 30 meeting, there were 109 more students and staff diagnosed with COVID-19. That included 62 staff members, 17 in-person students and 30 remote students, which may include middle and high school athletes who have in-person practices and competitions.
An additional 247 staff — more than half of whom work in elementary schools, which offer fully in-person classes — were placed under quarantine last week. As of Friday, when the report was issued, the district had 567 total staff in active quarantines. That is an estimated 7.8% of the district’s workforce.
The teachers union has been opposed to the hybrid plan, which requires educators to teach in-person and remote students at the same time.
“I’m sorry, but UTW does not have the confidence that the district will have an effective and safe plan for middle school and high school students and staff in the buildings,” said Kimberly Howard, president of United Teachers of Wichita.
Health officials have said the district’s cases are likely from exposures while out in the community and not clusters at school.
Adrienne Byrne, the county health director, told the school board on Oct. 30 that the county had only one school cluster. The county previously identified Derby High School as the location.
Derby has struggled to contain its outbreak, which has been considered an active cluster by the KDHE for more than a month.
The county health department has found three more school clusters since then, according to its online dashboard, but none of the locations have been publicly identified.
COVID-19 data and reopening schools
It is unclear what the work group doctors will tell the school board, which has not made a decision on basketball and other winter sports. Monday’s agenda item describes the discussion as: “These medical professionals will offer perspective on future use and interpretation of key data indicators related to schools.” Byrne suggested they may recommend modifications to the reopening guide.
When the board meets, members will likely base the discussion on data from Oct. 31. The weekly metrics report issued by the county health department and used by the school board is not expected to be updated with last week’s numbers until Tuesday. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment will issue its report with last week’s numbers Monday afternoon, but the KDHE has not been the primary source of data used by USD 259.
In addition to Sedgwick County’s weekly report, the local health department also has an online COVID-19 dashboard that is updated daily. The dashboard, which features a hospital status and a positive test rate graph, is not used by the school board.
Board member Mike Rodee said the current guide uses “random numbers” that are “biased” and challenged the validity of the information on the county’s dashboard.
“I had not seen this data before,” board member Mike Rodee said Oct. 30 of the weekly metrics report, which he lauded. “On the Sedgwick County web page, on the front page is this godawful graph that shows we’re in dire straits. It talks about hospital beds. ... These numbers are wrong, and until we can get them right, we can’t use bad data.”
The USD 259 reopening guide closely resembles the one developed by the Kansas State Department of Education’s work group. One difference is the local guide doesn’t use the state’s hospital capacity indicator. County health officials announced a week ago that both Wesley Healthcare and Ascension Via Christi hospitals in Wichita have no available ICU beds as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge.
Despite the outdated statistics in the weekly metrics report, the board will have at least three out of its four gating criteria in the red zone of its reopening guide. The positive test rate and the rate of new cases compared to population, which Byrne said are the two most important indicators, are far above the red zone thresholds and continue to worsen.
The red zone calls for moving classes for all grade levels online only and canceling all sports practices and competitions.
The school board has largely ignored its own guide. In both of its last two meetings, the school board did not determine a color zone for reopening after starting the year in the orange zone. The decision to send most older students to a blended learning is essentially what the less-restrictive yellow zone calls for.
Under pressure from student and parent protests, the district created an addendum to its guide to allow football and other fall sports after the original plan meant no athletics. That would have been allowed only in the least-restrictive green zone of the state’s guide. The change was apparently developed during a secret meeting of the district’s advisory committee. In another break from the state’s guide, Wichita later allowed spectators at sporting events.
This story was originally published November 9, 2020 at 5:00 AM.