Parental decisions to shake up school enrollments
The COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption across the education system could lead to enrollment changes in some school districts, the state’s education commissioner said Tuesday.
“We are hearing anecdotally that many parents of kindergarten children, or some parents of kindergarten children, have chosen to keep their kids home for another year and then start kindergarten the year after, so you may see lower kindergarten numbers this year,” Commissioner Jeff Riley said at a Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting. “We’re also hearing in some communities that some families have chosen to go to private or Catholic school, if that private or Catholic school is opening up full inperson and their district is not.”
District enrollment numbers are based on the student population as of Oct. 1, and Riley said those figures and comparisons to the previous school year will likely be available to discuss at the board’s November meeting.
Also at the November meeting, board members plan to check back in on regulations they approved Tuesday around student learning time. The amended regulations — initially adopted in June on an emergency basis, and later revised after a public comment period -- address issues around remote learning and delivering education during a state of emergency.
In keeping with the rules, school districts were directed to prepare plans for three models of instruction for this academic year — in-person with new safety measures, fully remote, and a hybrid of the two.
Local school committees made the choice for how their district would proceed. Baker administration officials have said the decisions should be made based on local public health data, and have been pushing for at least some in-person instruction in communities where the rates of COVID-19 spread are lower.
“At this time we feel like most of our schools should be back in person, to the greatest extent possible,” Riley said.
Andover parent Stephanie Sweet, who addressed the board during its public comment period, said her family is among those pursuing options other than their public schools this year in order to get them into a classroom.
She said they are now “spending thousands of dollars a month to send our three kids, ages six and under, to private facilities so that we can access full-time, in-person models for them.”
“The fact that this is our only option is simply unacceptable,” Sweet said.
She said Andover’s nine private kindergartens are fully reopened, and urged education officials to rethink some of their guidance — like rules limiting the number of children who can be transported on one bus — so that it would be easier for areas with low infection rates to bring kids into schools.
Newton resident David Goldstone also voiced dissatisfaction with his city’s decision to keep its high school remote for the time being, with no date set to return to classrooms.
Newton was assigned the moderate-risk “yellow” designation in the Department of Public Health’s most recent muncipal COVID-19 metrics, with an average daily incidence rate of four cases per 100,000 residents. The positivity rate of 0.44% was below the statewide 0.85 percent.
Andover’s rate of 3 cases per 100,000 puts that town in the lowrisk “green” category, and the test positivity rate there was 0.53%.
Goldstone said remote learning leaves students isolated, and they have less homework and an “incomplete curriculum.”
“The schools are abandoning our children,” he said. “Watching these harms inflicted on our daughters is the saddest experience we’ve had as parents.”