Beginning Monday, high school students will be back inside classrooms under staggered schedule
High School District 230 will start bringing students back to Andrew High School in Tinley Park, Sandburg in Orland Park and Stagg in Palos Hills on Monday in a move that was criticized by parents as not going far enough.
Under the plan approved by the school board Thursday, 25% of the district’s nearly 8,000 students would physically be in the classroom on a given day, meaning they will be in school one day each week and continue to learn remotely the rest of the time.
High School District 218 officials said in a letter Thursday they hoped to bring students back by the middle of October. The district has about 5,400 students at Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, Richards in Oak Lawn and Shepard in Palos Heights.
Other area high school districts, including Lockport Township High School District 205 and Lincoln-Way High School District 210, have recently put in place reopening plans that mix in-person and remote learning.
Districts say that favorable trends, such as relatively low COVID-19 positivity rates, are
Under District 230’s plan, one day each week would be fully remote learning for all students, and families continue to have the option of staying with remote if they don’t feel comfortable having their children return.
A survey of families earlier this month had a response rate of 87%, and 70% of families said they would opt for in-person learning, Superintendent James Gay said.
District 230’s plan is to see what the numbers look like with a fourth of students in buildings before moving to stage two of its reopening plan, with half its students attending two days a week. No timetable has been set for when that will happen.
The district has told families it would not return to fully in person until the state is at phase five of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Restore Illinois plan, which requires a vaccine to be widely available, a highly effective treatment or the elimination of any new COVID-19 cases over a sustained period.
Gay had notified families in a Sept. 21 letter of the plan to resume in-classroom learning. He said at Thursday’s meeting the “phased-in process is the right way to proceed.”
Members of the public emailed comments that were read at the meeting, and they were nearly unanimous in condemning the reopening plan as being insufficient.
Some said their students were falling behind because of remote learning and one comment suggested the district set up tents and use school gymnasiums to accommodate all students full-time.
“Let our teachers teach, let our children learn,” one parent said.
In District 218, Superintendent Ty Harting told families in a Thursday note that the district’s goal is to have half its freshmen return on Oct. 15 and 16, with 50% of all grade levels in class as of Oct. 19.
Harting noted COVID-19 positivity rates in the district’s boundaries have decreased gradually but consistently the last few weeks, which has given the district encouragement about resuming in-person teaching for the first time since mid-March.
“This is all predicated, of course, on conditions remaining stable or improving over the next few weeks,” he wrote.
Harting also warned that e-learning for all students could return depending on the data.
If the district brings back students next month “and conditions go south in November, we will not hesitate to close down and segue back to full remote learning,” Harting told families.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
