Hamilton delays in-person hybrid schedule
HAMILTON » That didn’t take long.
The Hamilton Township School District has postponed implementation of its A/B/C hybrid instructional model by one month in response to Gov. Phil Murphy’s latest guidelines for combating COVID-19.
Just two days after Murphy signed Executive Order No. 175, the Hamilton Board of Education hosted an emergency meeting Saturday and authorized widespread remote learning to take place from Sept. 8 through Oct. 9.
The district was previously preparing to educate most of its students with a combination of inperson learning and virtual instruction beginning next month, largely because the Murphy administration seemed hell-bent on getting children back into physical classrooms during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The New Jersey Department of Education forced districts across the Garden State to prepare for hybrid instruction, and Murphy earlier this summer declared schools “will open for in-person instruction and operations in some capacity” to start the 2020-21 academic year.
With New Jersey and the United States still facing a public health emergency, Murphy decided to give districts like Hamilton a new option: Any district that is unable to satisfy the health and safety requirements for in-person instruction “may provide full-time remote instruction to all students,” he said in his executive order signed Aug. 13.
Under Murphy’s directive for reopening, school districts must follow a litany of aggressive social distancing guidelines, including routine cleaning and sanitization of classrooms and mandatory face coverings for students and staff, to resume in-person instruction in some capacity.
Dr. Scott Rocco, superintendent of Hamilton’s public schools, said the district will postpone the start of its hybrid learning model to Monday, Oct. 12, for the “majority of our students.”
“Some of our students who require specialized programming and services (that can be difficult to replicate through remote learning) will have the opportunity to receive those services from September 8th through October 9th (or voluntarily elect remote learning as well),” Rocco said in a community letter dated Monday.
This means all students in the Hamilton Township School District will begin the schoolyear with all-remote learning effective Sept. 8, except for those who require specialized programming and services and do not elect remote learning.
“Since last school year,” Rocco said, “every employee in our district has worked to prepare for the opening of this school year.”
In a prior letter dated Aug. 12, Rocco foreshadowed that Hamilton’s public schools would not be 100% ready to launch the A/B/C hybrid model on Day 1.
“Premature and overly aggressive reopening has proven to be risky at its best and the source of widespread transmission in many areas at its worst,” he said, noting that “a number of school districts that have opened across the country are experiencing COVID-19 cases and have implemented unanticipated mandatory quarantines.”
After the school board’s emergency meeting, Rocco penned a follow-up letter reiterating his focus to reopen schools for in-person instruction with safety procedures exceeding the governor’s minimum guidelines. “As we continue to move forward,” the superintendent said Monday, “I want our community to know that every person in this district wants our students back in our schools, and we want to return to some form of normalcy. This is and will continue to be our effort until we can return to what we all remember as a regular school year.”
If the so-called A/B/C hybrid day schedule goes into effect as planned, onethird of the student body will report to school on certain days of the week while two-thirds of the students engage in remote learning from home. This schedule will address facility restrictions and ensure social distancing, the district previously said.