Wichita BOE reverses decision, middle and high schools will stick with online classes
Students in Wichita middle and high schools will no longer be going back to school in-person in a hybrid model after the Board of Education reversed an earlier decision amid skyrocketing coronavirus indicators.
Wichita Public Schools will stick with the current learning model for the rest of the semester, keeping all older students online only while elementary students are in-person or remote, depending on the enrollment choice at the start of the academic year.
The school board did not make any specific decisions regarding winter sports. Practices are set to start next week with the first competitions in less than a month.
The board had decided about three weeks ago that students in older grade levels would attend class in a hybrid or blended learning model. About 60% of students would have followed that plan, where half of those students went in-person on Mondays and Tuesdays while the other half went on Thursdays and Fridays. That plan is no longer in effect.
Doctors who spoke at the meeting did not make specific recommendations on school reopening. However, the information and opinions they provided were much more favorable to in-person learning than to allowing winter sports.
“Children in schools do not drive COVID-19 spread; adult behavior in the community do,” said Dr. Paul Teran, a pediatrician. “Closing schools to in-person attendance without other community mitigation measures will have minimal impact on the transmission of COVID-19 in the community.”
“Contact sports played indoors will be at very high risk for COVID-19 transmission this winter, especially as our community numbers increase,” Teran said. “Spectators at those indoor sports will be at a very high risk for COVID-19 transmission.”
While no coronavirus clusters have been reported among Wichita athletes, programs in suburban towns have been affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 cases on the teams that spread to the schools.
“I think it was by the grace of God that we didn’t have an outbreak,” Dr. Rebecca Reddy, a pediatrician, said of no reported clusters in Wichita fall sports. “... I think it’s dangerous to have sports at this time.”
The school district has had a few hundred cases of COVID-19, but health officials have said it is believed those students and staff were infected in the community, not at school. Kimber Kasitz, the district’s health director, said there were 109 new cases last week, up from 50 new cases the week before. Between Friday and Monday, another 68 cases were reported.
‘We think it’s ugly now’
The number of cases at schools has not been as bad as the number of cases in the larger community.
“We know that the numbers are going to get worse,” Reddy said. “They’re on an exponential curve right now. So we think it’s ugly now, it will get much worse. How long that lasts depends on our community response.”
School board members discussed the possibility of a formal resolution calling on city and county governments to take action to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The school board did not draft or vote on any such resolution Monday evening. A resolution could be drafted for the next meeting.
Wichita’s City Council allowed its mask law to expire last month as COVID-19 indicators worsened. Mayor Brandon Whipple, who wanted to extend the law, said he did not have the support of a majority of council members. The Sedgwick County Commission has twice rejected mask executive orders from Gov. Laura Kelly, but they have permitted a health order on masks from Dr. Garold Minns to stand.
That county health order has apparently never been enforced.
“There is no savior out there,” board member Stan Reeser said. “We hoped the federal government would have a national response to a national pandemic. That didn’t happen.”
“The governor tried and attempted to take some leadership. She was overruled.”
“Then we looked to our city leaders and our county leaders. We had a couple individual members on those boards that I think attempted to help us out, but that help never did come. I remember that dreaded morning when I woke, and I can’t tell you exactly when it happened, but I said it’s going to come down to the seven of us.”
“We’re in a national pandemic, and it’s going to be seven volunteers who wanted to help their community, try to hold this public school system together. That was the morning that I was literally sick to my stomach.”
Last week was the worst of the pandemic in the metro area. The school board spoke generally about the situation and did not take a detailed look at the current COVID-19 numbers and the gating criteria. While the criteria has largely been ignored since its adoption in August, school board members did discuss potentially revising the criteria in the future.
“I still believe the KSDE gating criteria, for the safety coming back,” Teran said. “But what we’re seeing when we are in red zones, it doesn’t necessarily mean to pull all of our kids out of school. Because we know, from what we’ve seen so far, there isn’t as much kid-to-kid and staff-to-staff transmission on the school grounds when we are following those mitigation factors.”
The current gating criteria, also known as the reopening guide, would likely call for moving all students at all grade levels online only and canceling athletics and other extracurricular activities.
“It simply is not safe for any grade level students to be in the buildings right now,” said Kimberly Howard, president of United Teachers of Wichita.
Wichita’s two major hospital systems are both at capacity for ICU patients as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge. Teran said the current COVID-19 indicators are “alarming” and the hospital situation could result in additional deaths because of inadequate access to medical care.
“Wichita is stressed right now, not for ventilator capacity, but for the capacity of those highly-trained medical personnel who know how to run them,” Reddy said. “We only have eight pulmonologists in this entire city, and two of them are out sick, and I’m sure you all can imagine with what.”
‘We need bigger change’
While the safety of schools is affected by the rates of transmission in the community, any action by the school district is unlikely to lead to any significant improvement in the county’s positive test rate, the rate of new cases or the hospitalization numbers.
“If we shut down school to every kid in the Wichita Public Schools but our community did the exact same things that they’re doing, it wouldn’t start to improve our percent positivity rate and our numbers in our hospital system,” Teran said. “We need bigger change than that.”
Teran said the gating criteria provides good insights into the community situation, but has limitations.
“It was also developed with the expectation that the larger community would implement safety measures in response to high levels of COVID, and not that our community thought that the schools are the only people responsible or who have the power to change the trajectory of COVID,” he said.
The risk of contracting COVID-19 at school is relatively low compared to the community transmission rate, but the risk of spreading the virus at school will increase as community spread worsens. Kasitz, the district’s health director, said most staff and students that contract COVID-19 do not know how they were exposed, but it is likely outside of school.
Teran said closing schools would not have a significant impact on the high rate of community spread. To reduce the transmission in the community, the focus should be on universal masking and limiting large gatherings, he said.
Sedgwick County loosened the restrictions on bars last month as COVID-19 indicators worsened.
“Why was it safe to open the bars, to stay open later, at that point in time?” board member Mike Rodee asked the doctors.
“It wasn’t,” Teran said. “When we look at it, kids and the parents and Wichita Public Schools don’t have the agency and the respect they deserve from our community.”
Board member Ben Blankley said that the school board’s initial announcement that high school students would return to hybrid in-person class might have been misinterpreted by the community as meaning the pandemic was over.
“The problem,” Reddy said, “is that you don’t have the power as a board to stop the spread of COVID in our community. But our county and our city leaders do. I just don’t know if we have the political wherewithal.”
Reeser said a resolution is a good idea, however: “People are not going to step up, unfortunately, and a resolution to the City Council and a resolution to Sedgwick County unfortunately is not going to correct the problem.”
The teachers union president questioned the school board’s political motivations behind pandemic decisions.
“Admit that the political pressures are greater than science and safety,” Howard said. “Admit that fears for the social and emotional health of students carry more weight than the physical threat the COVID-19 virus poses to students, faculty and families.”
The community response to the pandemic would also play a big role if winter sports were canceled, Teran said. The potential creation of leagues or club teams outside the school’s jurisdiction could worsen the situation.
“We’re in COVID for the long run,” he said, “and we don’t know when we’re going to get back to good, on-site education.”
Online education during the pandemic
The doctors and the school board members conceded that ongoing remote learning will have negative long-lasting effects, especially on academic performance.
But Dr. Kelli Netson, a pediatric neuropyschologist, said reopening schools now instead of after winter break won’t prevent long-term health and educational issues.
“We’re going to be dealing with the mental health and the academic fallout from this for years,” Netson said. “I think what makes sense at this point is managing disease spread and then looking at plans to mitigate the downstream effects of that.”
In addition to educational reasons for keeping the youngest children in classroom, health data also supports the decision, doctors said. Elementary school students are less likely to transmit the virus. However, high school students have similar transmission risk levels to adults.
Rodee critiqued the effectiveness of online learning. He said the 2020 senior class graduation “was a mockery of the system” because they were not in class to earn the diploma.
“They’re not learning at home,” Rodee said. He later added: “this remote thing ... we’re not teaching our children.”
Board member Ernestine Krehbiel defended remote education.
“There is some fantastic education going on remotely,” she said. “It is not being a wasted time.”
“I stand by my statement,” Rodee responded later. “I don’t think we’re getting the education we need, and I think in about five years we’re going to feel it. We’re going to have a gap.”
Rodee appeared to be speaking through tears when he moved that schools keep the plan developed last month of middle and high schools going to hybrid. No one seconded the motion.
Rodee made a second motion to shut schools down completely until January, meaning no in-person or online classes and no school employees getting paid. That motion also died for lack of a second.
Blankley later revived Rodee’s first motion to let older students attend hybrid classes.
“It is a disservice to continue in a full-remote model for secondary learners, even considering our community transmission,” Blankley said. “I know we’ll have staffing issues, and I’m certain that we will have to send out classrooms and probably whole buildings out to full remote.”
The motion failed in a 3-4 vote, with board president Sheril Logan joining Blankley and Rodee.
Reeser, who said the local COVID-19 numbers are “getting out of control,” made the motion to keep upper grades online only for the rest of the semester. It passed 5-2, with Blankley and Rodee opposed.
“What gets me tonight is the fact that those numbers will get worse,” Reeser said. “Those numbers will affect our buildings at some point.”
Reeser said he did not want to keep the older students in remote learning, but it is necessary “in order to send a clear message and get off this yo-yo situation and deal with the reality.”
The medical professionals at the meeting said that schools are relatively safe during the pandemic. Reddy said health care offices and schools are likely among the safest places during the pandemic because everybody follows the rules and mitigation strategies.
“We don’t have any of that in our community,” Reddy said. “There’s no enforcement of mitigation of COVID.”
While schools in Wichita have not proven to be a significant source of spreading the virus, increased transmission in the community makes in-person classes riskier. Additionally, sport and especially spectators pose a greater risk because of the inherent lack of social distancing, the doctors said.
Basketball and wrestling have previously been deemed high-risk activities. The board gave no direction to athletes and coaches on whether they will have a 2020-21 season.
“Tonight we’re not talking about winter sports,” Logan said. “We certainly could deal with that at a later time.”
Esau Freeman, a representative of the Service Employees International Union, read a staff letter to the Board of Education.
“While they tell us they appreciate us and give us stickers for our cars, I don’t need them to tell us that we are appreciated,” he said. “I need them to care that this is dangerous. I need them to value what we do as educators, and not see us as glorified babysitters. And I need the board to give a hoot about something other than parents pushing to get them back into school. Remote is hard, but it’s going to be a lot harder when people start getting sick.”
Rodee asked people to stop emailing him about reopening amid the pandemic.
“I’ve heard all your emails about putting kids back in school,” Rodee said. “Don’t email me unless it’s something special. Because I’m tired of reading emails about how we’re doing this. If there’s something new, something special: email me. I’m going to catch hell for this, and that’s fine. Because I’m tired of getting 1,000 emails that are 10 pages long and hard to read.”
“If you’re a teacher telling me how you’re overworked, or overpaid, or underpaid, or something like that, I get it. But let’s talk about something new now.”
This story was originally published November 9, 2020 at 8:16 PM.