More south suburban schools pause in-person classes as COVID-19 surges
As he prepares to send his school district’s 3,300 students home for an extended period of learning remotely, Paul Enderle hopes for better news about COVID-19 in January.
The superintendent of Oak Lawn-Hometown School District 123 knows that doing so “puts a great deal of stress on families that need child care,” noting that many parents in his district work in health care and cannot work from home and supervise young children as they attend class virtually.
District 123 is joining the growing number of school districts in the south and southwest suburbs that have decided it’s unsafe to have students in classrooms amid rising numbers of COVID-19 cases and positivity rates.
His district, along with High School District 230 in Orland Park and New Lenox School District 122, have announced plans to, at least for the near term, keep students at home. That follows recent decisions by area districts such as Lincoln-Way 210 and Bremen 228 to hit the pause button on in-person learning.
District 123 students will be off next week for Thanksgiving break, and won’t have school Nov. 30 or Dec. 1 so teachers can prepare for teaching remotely. The district hopes to have students resume a hybrid model mixing in-person and remote learning by Jan. 19.
“Our hope is the second wave will have flattened out enough by that time to give us the confidence to resume,” Enderle said Thursday.
While Gov. J.B. Pritzker has issued a stay-at-home advisory which prohibits indoor food and bar service and limits capacity at some stores, the advisory doesn’t affect schools like the original stay-at-home order in midMarch.
Schools had to, at the time, quickly ramp up virtual learning programs, which they’ve since
refined before the start of this school year, which for many districts began remotely.
Some Southland districts had, in recent weeks, begun to bring back students on a limited basis under blended or hybrid learning models that mixed in person with remote learning.
Since that time, districts have seen rising numbers of positive cases in the communities where they operate, prompting some, but not all, to make the move to remote. Districts say they are confident their own measures to contain the virus are working, and maintain that contact tracing shows most cases have been traced back to social gatherings or family settings.
In what it terms an “adaptive pause,” District 230, which operates Andrew, Stagg and Sandburg high schools, will shift Monday to remote teaching and potentially return to its hybrid model Dec. 7, according to Superintendent James Gay.
In a note to families, Gay said that staff who are COVID-19 positive or need to quarantine due to close contact have been able to work from home, but that “even with these creative practices in place, it is becoming challenging to safely and effectively cover these classes,” and that there have been large numbers of student absences due to positive test results or close contact.
The superintendent said that among students who had signed up for the district’s hybrid model that includes in- classroom learning, absences have recently ranged between 60 and 110 in a given week at each of the district’s three schools.
For the week ended Nov. 13, the district reported 31 positive COVID-19 cases and 39 close contact cases among students and staff districtwide. For the week ended Nov. 6 there were 23 positive cases and 37 close contact cases.
In a message to families Tuesday, New Lenox School District 122 Superintendent Lori Motsch said it has become nearly impossible to maintain adequate staffing levels due to teachers having to quarantine. The district has just under 5,600 students and staff.
There is no school scheduled after Thursday, with students off Friday to allow for remote instruction training for staff, followed by no classes Monday or Tuesday for parent/teacher conferences then a threeday Thanksgiving break.
Remote learning will start Nov. 30 and continue until the district’s winter break, which begins Dec. 21. Students were due to come back Jan. 5, but the district is allowing for a “postholiday quarantine,” with the plan now to resume in-person learning Jan. 19.
District 123 is also building in a post- holiday breather to its calendar.
Winter break starts Dec. 23 and the district originally planned to resume in-person learning Jan. 6, but is stretching that out to after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Enderle said the district will let families know early in theweek of Jan. 11, based on the coronavirus metrics, whether hybrid teaching will resume Jan. 19.
The district started the school year with hybrid learning, with a limited number of students in buildings at any given time. About30% of families opted to have their children continue to learn remotely, he said.
For the first 10 weeks of the school year, student absences due to COVID-19, primarily kids having to isolate due to a close-contact case, were running at about 100 per day, but that has jumped to about 220 each day in the last couple of weeks, Enderle said.
Staff absences due to COVID-19, either for positive cases or close contact, are now running well over 25 per day compared with fewer than 10 a couple of weeks ago, he said.
“As we moved into November we started seeing those numbers increase,” he said.
Staff who are well enough can teach from home, but in those instances the district has a substitute teacher staying in the classroom to supervise students, and Enderle said about 15% of available substitutes are themselves quarantined at home.
“We hung int here as long as we could” with keeping students in classrooms, the superintendent told district families in a video message Wednesday.
He said the district has seen a lag of between 10 and 14 days in rising absences, andthe impact they are now experiencing is based on case counts and positivity rates recorded a couple of weeks ago.
Enderle said that while the positivity rate within the district’s communities is at 15%, “our school environment was extremely safe” and transmission rates within the district have been very low.