Districts ‘pump brakes’ on return

West Las Vegas, Los Alamos classes to resume only online

Superintendent Chris Gutierrez made the call Tuesday morning: Students and staff in the West Las Vegas School District will start the new year from home.

“We decided to pump the brakes a little bit,” Gutierrez said in an interview after announcing his district would be executing what he called the “red option” of public school reopening plans: an all-virtual-learning model.

Students will engage in distance-learning classes from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, starting Aug. 10, his announcement said.

The Los Alamos school board voted in a meeting late Tuesday night to follow a similar path, the Los Alamos Monitor reported, with fully remote learning starting Aug. 13 and lasting at least until Labor Day.

Gutierrez said in the interview the West Las Vegas District also would reassess pandemic-related data after Labor Day, Sept. 7.

“It’s easier to scale things back than it is to scale up, so we’re planning for the worst-case scenario of distance learning the full entire year,” he said.

West Las Vegas, in San Miguel County, and Los Alamos Public Schools are the first districts in the area to outright forgo a return to classrooms next month amid the persistent coronavirus pandemic.

Many educators in the state are awaiting a decision by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state health officials in the coming days on whether schools can reopen their campuses as COVID-19 cases continue to surge.

Public school districts and charter schools across New Mexico have been submitting plans to the state Public Education Department for how they would return to classrooms, as least part time, as soon as next month while ensuring students and staff can follow social-distancing guidelines and other safety measures.

State data shows San Miguel County, with a population of about 27,000 people, had 28 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Tuesday. Its rate of cases per capita is less than half of that in Santa Fe County, which had 352 cases.

Los Alamos County, with a population of just over 19,000, had 13 cases.

Gutierrez, who taught high school math and science in West Las Vegas for a decade before becoming superintendent, said his district has enough laptops for all 1,500 students and set up 100 internet hot spots for distance-learning programs after the state shut down campuses in mid-March.

Evanglene Griego, a fifth grade teacher at Union Street Elementary who has four kids in the district, said distance-learning programs work for most students.

For a handful, however, it becomes a challenge.

Griego was able to consistently reach

20 of her 25 students online in the spring, she said.

“I did have students sitting in parking lots trying to get work done because they didn’t have internet access in an apartment or rural area,” Griego said. “It breaks my heart, but I know one girl, and her dad would drive around into our hot spots and try to help her get access several times a week.”

Janet Ulibarri, a parent of an incoming kindergartner, second grader and sixth grader in West Las Vegas schools, said she is relieved by the superintendent’s decision.

She said she had been exploring other options — such as home-schooling or moving her kids into New Mexico Connections Academy, a state-chartered school with an online curriculum — if they were going to be asked to return to classrooms.

She said she thinks it’s too risky as COVID-19 cases steadily rise.

“When we first started opening up New Mexico in early June, I would have said, ‘I’m willing for my kids to go back to school. Let’s give it a shot.’ But things aren’t going the way we anticipated,” Ulibarri said.

“I mean, I don’t want to go to work and wear a mask for eight hours a day and keep a distance,” she added, “so why would I make my children do that?”