Wichita schools will send seniors and freshmen to in-person classes four days a week
Starting next week, Wichita Public Schools will begin transitioning some secondary students to in-person classes four days a week.
District officials announced Monday evening that on March 1, seniors and 6th-graders will start attending class on-site every day except for Wednesdays, which will remain remote. Freshmen will join starting March 8.
The learning model change applies only to students whose parents opted for on-site learning. Parents who chose the remote learning model will continue to keep their children at home. School officials have previously said about 40% of students were enrolled in online-only education.
Also on March 1, all in-person students at Marshall Middle School, regardless of grade level, will be in on-site learning except for Wednesdays as part of a pilot project. Additionally, all spring sport athletes at middle and high schools who opted for in-person education will be on-site four days a week.
“Social distancing will occur to the greatest extent possible, and we will continue to expect students to wear masks, wash hands, and stay home if they are sick,” district officials wrote in a notice posted to the USD 259 website.
The district’s announcement cited decreasing COVID-19 numbers in making the decision.
“WPS will evaluate the success of this transition, which may give more students the opportunity to return to onsite learning four days a week,” the district notice said.
Stan Reeser, president of the Board of Education, told The Eagle that Monday’s announcement was in line with his motion on Jan. 11 that authorized moving secondary students to hybrid in-person classes “as quickly as we could, as safely as we could.” The school board did not meet on Monday.
“So this is still part of the hybrid system and still part of the January motion,” Reeser said. “We will vote on March 8, once we have some data with this hybrid system and the one pilot program we have at Marshall, we will have a full report with information on how the system is handling that many students back in.”
At the meeting, the school board will review data from the first seven days of the new reopening plan.
“I think we’re all excited that we’re moving closer and closer and we’re inching forward toward providing at least a little bit more normalcy,” Reeser said. “We’re hoping that we can get some good information about how this is working so that we can have a solid plan to move to some type of normalcy for the fourth quarter.”
Coronavirus indicators have been trending downward in Kansas and Sedgwick County since spiking after the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. No surge materialized after the Super Bowl, and public health officials are hopeful that last week’s record-breaking cold weather further slowed the spread.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s case report on Monday was the best since early September. Last week, the Sedgwick County Health Department moved the hospital status to “good” after Wesley Medical Center and Ascension Via Christi St. Francis reported having available ICU beds for the first time since late October.
The move comes as more teachers and school staff have received first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. The district held its second vaccination clinic over the weekend.
Reeser said the USD 259 vaccination program “is going very well and going at a nice pace.” He said a coworker, a medical doctor at Ascension Via Christi, told him the school’s clinic “was one of the best he had seen in this whole region.”
As of Friday, Wichita Public Schools had 421 staff in active quarantines, down from 568 the week before.
There have been 1,819 cases of COVID-19 among school students and staff, which was an increase of 10 in the last week. Two of the patients were school employees, one was a remote student and seven were in-person students.
“With the COVID numbers dropping as fast as they were, it’s exciting that we can get these students that chose in-person learning back as soon as March 1,” Reeser said.
“There’s a reason why these parents and these students selected in-person learning, and that is because they were willing to take the risk because they knew they needed this in order to succeed. We have been cautious. We will continue to be cautious. This is still a hybrid program, and we will see what we can do for the fourth quarter at the March 8 meeting.”
In November, the school district pleaded with the community to heed the advice from public health officials on face masks and other mitigation measures. By the end of the month, staffing shortages caused by the pandemic forced the district to move classes at all grade levels online only.
Reeser said the decision to shut down elementary schools “was a big shock.”
Since then, the district has faced mounting pressure to reopen schools.
“I think the factors that we started considering with that January vote to move to hybrid,” Reeser said, “was the fact that the new president has a goal for a certain amount of kids in-person in his first 100 days of administration, the Kansas Department of Education and the commissioner, Randy Watson, and the state board of education encouraged more students in-person, and then we’re not deaf to what some legislators in Topeka are saying about more in-person learning.
“And we agree ... we just have to do it safely, and we need some data and information on how to do that.”
The situation had improved enough by January that the school board reopened elementary schools for fully in-person classes, for those who chose on-site learning. Secondary students stepped inside classrooms, for the first time since March 2020, with a hybrid plan that had children go to in-person classes two days a week.
“If we continue to do the right thing and if we continue to get the community cooperation on these things, then we have a new reality,” Reeser said. “And that new reality is we think we can move safely back to in-person learning at a reasonable pace.”
This story was originally published February 22, 2021 at 6:52 PM.