Lake schools reverse plans
New guidance from health officials prompts change on e-learning
After receiving additional guidance from health officials, many Lake County superintendents are going back on a letter they released stating all Lake County schools would start the school year inperson.
Since the July 13 letter, many districts in the area, such as Gary Community School Corp., Griffith Public Schools and Lake Ridge Schools, have decided to move to an all-online approach to begin the school year. Recommending the move online was something superintendents discussed together, Griffith Superintendent Michele Riise said.
“After much discussion, we just knew, strongly, that we needed to rethink what we were going to do,” Riise said. “Many of the communities are different, but yet the superintendents felt strongly we are a county and we have to work together.”
The decision comes after many superintendents were given new guidance by Lake County Public Health Officer Dr. Chandana Vavilala and decided to recommend the
switch to all online their respective school boards.
In guidance issued to the schools, Vavilala detailed several different recommendations for the upcoming school year, regarding topics such as social distancing, online instruction and contact sports.
“When they came out finally with their guidance for reopening, they were quite a bit more stringent than we thought they would be,” School Town of Highland Superintendent Brian Smith said. “To try to meet those recommendations was going to be next to impossible.”
Some of the guidance given were things larger schools in the area would be unable to follow, such as the recommendation stating if a six-foot distance between students cannot be achieved, classes should either be conducted in a hybrid model or online only.
Other Lake County schools that have gone back on the July 13 letter and will begin the school year remotely include Merrillville Community School Corp., School City of Hobart, School Town of Highland, River Forest Community School Corp., School City of Hammond and School City of East Chicago.
“When we first signed that letter, the plan was done the first week of July, and the positivity rates were down, the number of cases were down, but for some particular reason we started to see a spike in the number of cases and the positivity rate,” East Chicago Superintendent Dee-Etta Wright said. “It started to become pretty alarming to me.”
Though many superintendents recommended the switch, not all were approved by their school boards. Lake Central School Corp. will continue giving parents the option to choose between inperson and online learning despite receiving a recommendation from the administration.
“Personally, our administrative team didn’t want to be the test case,” Lake Central Superintendent Larry Veracco said. “But given the board’s decision, we are going to make the best of this situation.”
Veracco said the district plans to keep students from lingering in hallways during passing periods or after they get off the bus in the morning, in addition to trying to space out classrooms as much as possible.
“That’s what’s going to make school not really feel very normal,” Veracco said. “While the instruction in the class can still be dynamic — and it will be — all the other parts of school that kids enjoy, we’re going to suck a lot of that fun out of it. That’s OK, we just all have to accept that for what it is.”
Veracco said though he doesn’t enjoy using e-learning, one of his biggest concerns with beginning the school year in person is the health of the teachers throughout the corporation.
“I’ve never been a fan of e-learning, but e-learning is some learning, and we’re in unprecedented times,” Veracco said. “If we lose too many teachers through the experiment of in-person learning, we can’t function.”
Like Lake Central, Crown Point Community School Corp. and the School Town of Munster will also continue with offering in-person and online learning. Crown Point will use a hybrid-learning model during the pandemic, while Munster gave families a choice between the two.
With the number of students enrolled for in-person learning at School Town of Munster, which was 2,601 as of Aug. 6, Superintendent Jeff Hendrix said the district was able to space desks a minimum of five feet apart, with no more than 25 students in each classroom, so he believed conducting the beginning of the school year online did not need to be recommended.
Hendrix said while the district felt it met the needs of the Lake County Health Department and have plenty of safety precautions in place, remaining in person will largely depend on the surrounding community.
“It’s everybody outside of our school walls that really have to change what they’re doing,” Hendrix said. “If people don’t wear their masks and they don’t social distance, then we probably will have to go to remote learning at some point, because the numbers will climb to fast for us to be able to control it.”