Wanted: An A+ reopening

Educator: We want students back, “but we have to be realistic”

No one can be sure what classrooms might look like when students return to school in the fall, but a reopening plan is starting to take shape.

The Capital Region’s education reboot would likely include face coverings, health checks at the door, mental health support and smaller class sizes, but there are still many variables in play, according to Capital Region

BOCES Superintendent Anita Murphy.

“We have a variety of scenarios that we have been working on. If there is a vaccine and we can bring kids back like normal, or we can’t bring kids back to school at all, and then all the scenarios in between,” Murphy said. “We all want this to be over and we want our children back, but we have to be realistic.”

Murphy, who oversees regional education planning for 24 school districts and 80,000 students, has been steering a conversation among educators on the topic since schools were closed in mid-march and teaching was moved online to stymie the spread of COVID-19.

A daily virtual meeting for superintendents has spawned a reopening committee which is designing an infrastructure for students to safely return to school buildings. Districts must submit reopening plans to state officials by July.

School officials are beginning to conduct space studies. They are surveying parents, identifying students who need to be in school for the Capital Region economy to return to normal, and calculating how many students would require a physical classroom and more individual instruction to be successful.

Many districts may settle on a hybrid model, where some students go to school and others stay at home and do schoolwork online for a while longer.

“We have children who have soared ahead in this environment,” Murphy noted. “There’s also going to be parents who say

aid the community during the COVID-19 crisis.

In partnership with businesses, government and philanthropic partners, the United Way and Community Foundation provided hundreds and thousands of grants to nonprofits in the area.

Whitney M. Young Jr. Health Center received a $50,000 grant from the fund and established walkup and mobile COVID-19 testing sites across Albany County to address access to testing in underserved communities, an initiative that was led by Albany County Executive Dan Mccoy.

David Shippee, the president and CEO of the health center, said many of their clients don’t have transportation to get to some of the testing sites. So, he decided to bring the testing sites to them. They have rotating locations, which can be found on the health center’s website.

The Whitney M. Young Jr. Health Center is the fifth week of testing. Thus far, more than 2,000 people have been tested by the health center.

“The first three weeks we did testing, 60 percent of people we tested were people of color,” Shippee said. “Now as time has marched on, that’s down to an equal 50-50.”

Out of all the positive tests in the Capital Region, a little more than 10 percent of those were done by the Whitney Young testing program, Shippee said.

However, to make such a program possible, they needed outside funding to make it happen.

About 70 percent of the people that were tested were not Whitney Young patients, so they needed to be screened and registered before testing. The organization had to triple the amount of people in their call center.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit still had a host of other services it had to run such as its programs for those struggling with addiction and emergency dental care, among many others.

Maintaining all these programs and the COVID-19 testing would not have been feasible without federal dollars and the grant money from the COVID-19 relief fund.

“(The grants) helped us maintain the core services we needed to be available for our population,” Shippee said.

Besides testing, the COVID-19 response fund also provided grants for services that hit close to home for a lot of people. For many families, local nonprofits have been essential for them to put food on the table.

Before the pandemic, the Boys and Girls Club of the Capital Area would provide dinners for those who signed up. Now the organization is providing breakfast and lunch since children can no longer get those meals in school.

The new program started March 18, and they served 425 meals on the first day, and it continued to grow. Now they serve 13,000 meals a week.

“We’ve more than doubled our capacity,” said Justin Reuter, CEO of the

Boys and Girls Club of the Capital Area.

The Boys and Girls Club had to invest in equipment to make the production increase possible. So they used the grant money to buy another commercial oven, coolers and rolling carts. They are also serving adults when they ask for food.

“The good thing about this funding is that we’re investing it in things we can use after the pandemic,” Reuter said.

He said without the funding from the Community Foundation and the United Way, it wouldn’t have been possible to have such a fast response.

“We’d have to be more creative and rely on community members to support (the meal program). The good thing about this grant is that it was quick, and we had to make quick decisions,” Reuter said. “Every week more people are asking for (meals), and we’re getting more and more walk ups.”

Becca.carballo@ timesunion.com 518-4545092 @Becca_carballo