Plan would keep Wichita high school classes online. Vote set for Thursday
Fall sports would continue as planned in Wichita public schools, but high school classes would move online, under a plan discussed by the Board of Education based on current coronavirus numbers.
Parents of elementary and middle school students would have the choice of remote learning or sending their children back to school for in-person classes, based on current numbers.
The school board is scheduled to vote on the school reopening plan on Thursday. The 6 p.m. meeting is closed to the public due to the pandemic, though it will be available live on WPS-TV on Cox Channel 20, online at www.usd259.org/wpstvonline or by searching WPS-TV on the Livestream app for phone, Roku and Apple TV.
Public comments may be submitted by emailing the clerk of the board at mwillome@usd259.net by 8 a.m. Thursday.
“At this point in time, in using the charts and looking at all the data, it appears to me that we are on a downward trend overall,” board President Sheril Logan said of COVID-19 numbers in the county. “... That looks like in Sedgwick County we are going in the right direction, thank goodness.”
One indicator being looked at by the state and local school board is the percent of tests that come back positive for the coronavirus. Based on the school board’s discussions, which is in line with the state’s guidance, a rate of above 10% would mean high school classes would be online only. The positive test rate Monday was 11.37%.
All students would go to online classes at a rate above 15%, a percentage the county has never reached.
“I am a little bit uncomfortable saying on Thursday that if we aren’t at 9.9 or 10.0 (percent positive tests) that we definitely are going to have all remote, because of the unknown,” Logan said.
The Monday evening workshop meeting was intended to give USD 259 administrators guidance in formulating an official reopening plan. The various recommendations made during the workshop can be amended on Thursday before the final vote.
The school board’s plan comes after the Kansas State Department of Education issued its own guidelines last week. The board considered the state recommendations, as well as similar guides from the Kansas National Education Association and the Sedgwick County Health Department.
Based on the current pandemic indicators, the Wichita plan would be more lenient than the state plan, with three of the biggest difference being the Wichita school board would allow more students — particularly middle school students — to attend classes in-person, allow all extracurricular activities and allow some spectators at sporting and other events.
The Wichita plan is based on only one pandemic indicator — the positive test percentage — while the state guidelines use five indicators.
Under the Wichita plan, which could change, a rate of above 10% would mean high school classes would be online only. All students would go to online classes at a rate above 15%.
The positive test percentage from the Sedgwick County Health Department is a rolling 14-day average. It had peaked in the first months of the pandemic at 12.06% on April 19 then dropped to less than 1% on May 27, when the local economy was reopened without restrictions. It increased in the weeks since, peaking again at 14.03% on July 23.
It has since decreased and hovered between 10% and 11% for about 10 days before Monday’s spike to 11.37%.
“I just have absolute confidence that everybody in Sedgwick County is going to start wearing their mask if they haven’t, and they’re going to all nag all of their relatives to wear their masks, and it’s going to continue to just go right down,” said board member Ernestine Krehbiel. “That slope is going to continue, and once we get back in school, we’re just going to stay there. I have confidence in Sedgwick County.”
Logan said the percentage could improve — or it could get worse — before the start of classes on Sept. 8. But the decision needs to be made earlier.
“Our parents and our staff deserve to know what’s going to happen so that they can begin to prepare for that,” she said.
Board members did not discuss the four other indicators included in the state guidance, which measure student absenteeism, the rate of new COVID-19 cases in the county compared to population, the trend in that rate and local hospital capacity. It was not clear why the other indicators were ignored.
No doctors, epidemiologists or other public health officials were included in the workshop discussions.
The board did not mention the six schools that have confirmed cases of COVID-19. A district official told The Eagle on Monday that she had “not heard of any new cases” since Friday and all of the school employees who had tested positive had been infected outside of the workplace.
The district has said it does not know how many school staff have tested positive.
Board member Mike Rodee asked if the positive test percentage includes asymptomatic patients, then suggested that people without symptoms are not infected.
“So part of those positive results could be asymptomatic, which nobody has the disease, they just tested positive for it,” Rodee said.
“If they’re positive, they have it,” board member Stan Reeser replied. “They may not have symptoms, they may not need hospitalization. But they do have the COVID virus.”
Rodee later said it didn’t make sense to him that the positive rate increased on Monday after a downward trend.
“I don’t trust this data,” he said.
The state’s so-called gating criteria for reopening schools uses a color-coded matrix with four plans. The state guidelines included hybrid models that blended on-site and online learning in the middle two plans, which are yellow and orange.
Local school officials have already decided that a hybrid education system is not practical for Wichita. A previously discussed hybrid model suggested having some students attend in-person on Mondays and Tuesdays with other students attending Thursdays and Fridays.
The district has three models: in-person, remote learning and Education Imagine Academy. The virtual academy was capped at 500 students and is already full. Thursday’s decision will only affect those who chose in-person classes and could force them into remote learning.
The board replaced references to a hybrid model with on-site education instead of remote learning. The result seemingly leaves no difference between the state’s green and yellow reopening plans.
Logan, the board president, said she considers the green category to be a return to everyone at school as it was before the pandemic. The state guidelines do not suggest that green is back to normal. Rather, it is in-person with restrictions, including social distancing. The various guidelines have the positive test percentage for the green group at less than 5%.
Board member Julie Hedrick said she would like to have the green reopening, which is the least restrictive, be based on having a vaccine available. Or, at the least, a vaccine should be available to return to normal.
Board member Ron Rosales said there may be issues with basing reopening on a vaccine because some people don’t want to get other vaccinations. Rodee said that no one knows when a vaccine could become available and how effective it would be.
“I won’t take the flu shot because I’m afraid of the flu shot,” Rodee said. “I’m afraid of a DPT shot.”
He added that “nobody understands this virus” and “I don’t trust the drug companies.”
Board member Ben Blankley asked if there could be a model that allows special education students to meet in-person while other students are remote. Superintendent Alicia Thompson said no such plan exists. The superintendent also told the board member that there is no criteria for when staff would move to working remotely.
Several board members supported making their decisions last for the first nine weeks of classes, but Rodee suggested that if school starts online, it should stay that way for the full semester with no sports, after-school programs or extracurricular activities. He would still expect teachers to teach from the classroom, and student test scores should still meet the district’s goals.
“Sadly, if we do that (go online), I’m sure there’s going to be people that we’re going to have to lay off, if there’s extra people. ... It wouldn’t be teachers because we need them in the classroom, but aides and those types of folks, we may have to lay off until we come back to school again,” Rodee said.
The board’s guidelines, as discussed, loosened the restrictions on sports and other extracurricular activities.
Under the state plan, the orange group, which would be the reopening plan based on the county’s current coronavirus numbers, calls for banning all of those activities. The state’s yellow guidelines allows lower-risk activities such as cross country, but would ban football, basketball, wrestling, band and choir. Only the green reopening guides permit all activities.
Several Wichita board members want to allow all activities even if high school classes are only taught online.
J. Means, the district’s athletic director, said there are guidelines from the Kansas State High School Activities Association on how to play sports during the pandemic. Student-athletes and coaches have been following those recommendations. Board members asked that more details be shared at the next meeting.
Board members suggested that athletics staff look into streaming larger sporting events while allowing only family members to attend smaller events.
Rodee said he thinks the reopening decision should apply to all USD 259 students, not just certain grade levels.
“I’m in disagreement with you, Mike,” Hedrick said. “I respect all the other entities, and particularly Sedgwick County Health Department. They specified that a different requirement for the younger kids than the older kids, and I don’t feel that I have the ability to go against the medical professionals.”
Krehbiel said that is why she would like a model that allows elementary school students to return to in-person classes while high schoolers remain at home.
The state guidelines include middle school students with the high schoolers as online-only for the orange category. The school board’s discussions shifted middle school into the in-person group with elementary students.
The district has already approved spending $24 million on computers to make sure all students can learn from home if needed.
“We need to think about our kids and our teachers, and we also need to be thinking about our parents because daycare is not going to be out there for people that are jumping around,” Rodee said. “And they’re going to lose their jobs because we’re making them stay at home instead of working.”
Rodee suggested that the gating criteria guidelines came from biased sources.
“Here’s how I look at those three other people that gave us numbers,” Rodee said. “One won’t talk to us. The other two are biased in what they’re talking about, I believe — Kansas NEA and the Kansas State Department of Education has failed to give us any guidance throughout, so I’m a little bit tainted with those guys.”
“I think we need to come up with our own numbers, based on what we’re doing in Sedgwick County and not in the state of Kansas. And, you know, based on this graph by Sedgwick County, if you look back (with) Kansas NEA, we would never be on-site. We would never get there. And I think that’s wrong. We would be more in the full remote most of the time, which doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I think we need to make sure that our on-site percentage is high enough that it’s a usable number, and I think 5% (the cutoff from the green to yellow categories) is way too low.”
He suggested that schools should be in-person as long as the positive test rate is below 11%.
It was later pointed out that the latest numbers from the county health department had a positive rate above 11%. Rodee then said that a rate of less than 15% would be good enough to return to in-person classes. He later suggested 25%.
The board ultimately chose to use a mix of wording from the state education department and the local health department in formulating their own draft. They did not use verbiage from the state teachers’ union. Hedrick said the various groups had similar recommendations.
Reeser said he wants to “refer to all credible gating criterias.”
“But I want to be careful that we are not painting ourselves in a corner where we are getting jerked around day to day based off of something that goes up point-five percent. ... I don’t want to draw black lines where if you just barely step over it all of a sudden we have to send the buses out and send everyone home at that moment.”
Other board members also expressed a desire to avoid a cycle of opening, closing and reopening based on changing COVID-19 statistics.
While there was some initial support for not having specific COVID-19 numbers in the district’s reopening guidelines, Krehbiel said they make the plan clear for parents “because they can look at the Sedgwick County data.”
“I like the fact of making it so that parents aren’t feeling like we’re trying to hide something or that we’re rubbing a magic Aladdin lamp to figure out,” Krehbiel said. “Just saying we’re going to look at all of these different criteria and then decide is still very nebulous, and I really think that parents and the teachers, while they will grumble — almost any direction we go in, there’s going to be somebody that’s not going to like it — but if they know what it is, they can say ‘well I would have done it differently, but.’ “
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 1:11 PM.