Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Board votes to start year online
ROYERSFORD » The Spring-Ford Area School Board has voted unanimously to offer online instruction for the first quarter of the coming school year.
The vote came at the end of a nearly four-hour meeting on July 27 during which Superintendent David Goodin described the plan as a “soft opening.”
As such, it envisions teachers teaching from school buildings to students watching on computers; some special education students being educated in nearly empty buildings and extra-curricular activities “most of which are hap
pening outside,” continuing.
Board member Tom DiBello expressed reservations that “we can’t provide classes to students between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and then at 3 p.m. they go do what they want. It seems contradictory.”
The administration presented three possible opening scenarios labeled green, yellow and red.
The “green plan” was a full reopening, with added precautions. The “yellow plan” a hybrid with half the students attending Mondays and Tuesdays, the others Thursdays and Fridays, with teachers being given a prep day on Wednesdays.
On the days the students were not in school, they would be learning online.
The red plan is an all-online plan.
“Our goal would have been to bring students back to school as soon as possible,” Goodin said. “But as you’ve heard, there is a wide variety of feeling on this topic.”
“This is probably the most difficult recommendation I’ve ever had to make in my career,” he said. “But looking at all the variables, and everything that’s going on, I think we have to start off with the red plan for at least the first grading period and move to the hybrid plan as conditions allow.”
When those conditions might allow remains an unanswered question.
“There are still a lot of unknowns, and we don’t want to make any false promises,” said school board President Colleen Zasowski. “We’ll have to evaluate as we go in hopes we’ll be able to move in that direction should all the pieces call in place.”
“There are no good choices and I am sorry for the families for whom this will present a hardship,” said school board member Margaret Wright.
“I have no doubt the curriculum will be more rigorous, more advanced and more personalized than we had in the spring,” she said. “We will have good, solid offerings for our students.”
But board member Diane Sullivan, who spent a career in the medical profession, warned against false hope that a vaccine will be available soon enough to facilitate an early return to inperson education.
School board members will continue to meet once a week to work out the details that will follow the board’s decision.