Parents raise concerns over schools reopening
As Columbus City Schools prepares for the second time to return about half of its students to buildings for inperson learning, some families are asking the district to reconsider.
It also happened in the fall, the first time the state’s largest district, with nearly 50,000 students, announced a plan to resume classes, but ultimately backtracked due to concerns about COVID-19.
As of Monday, daily COVID-19 cases reported in Columbus have been trending downward for the past two weeks, but are still significantly elevated from the fall, according to Columbus Public Health‘s website.
“In my opinion, the data from around the world have shown that inschool transmission reflects community transmission,” said Liesel Seryak, 39, of the Northwest Side, one of three parents who spoke at Tuesday evening’s Columbus Board of Education meeting. The district hosted the meeting virtually using Zoom.
“So when community transmission rates are at about the highest level of the entire pandemic in our community, it is not the time to return to in-person instruction, absent a transparent, science-based reason showing that the benefits outweigh the cost.”
The district’s plan calls for some classes to gradually resume Feb. 1, starting with students in preschool and grades K-3; select students in all grades with “complex needs,” such as disabilities; and high school students in career-technical education programs at Columbus Downtown High School and the Fort Hayes Career Center.
Students in grades 4-5, meanwhile, will transition into the “blended learning” mode on Feb. 8.
Students will attend in-person classes twice a week and learn at home the other three days.
Families that want their children to continue learning online can enroll in the district’s fully online digital academy. Its enrollment period has been extended to Feb. 12.
Parent Kimberly Clark, of Beechwold, expressed concerns Tuesday about a lack of options, however, because the academy’s curriculum is managed by a third-party vendor and not created by district teachers. Her son, a third-grader at Indian Springs Elementary School, has a special-edu
The new station is equipped to house up to 15 people at a time in single-person dormitory rooms, Martin said. Most shifts have about nine people who would be sleeping at the station, but the station allows for growth or students riding along with fire crews to be housed comfortably.
Like Station 35 that opened last year on North Waggoner Road on the Far East Side, Martin said new Station 16 also has a number of features designed to improve and positively impact the health of firefighters and paramedics.
A transition locker room is located immediately off the garage area, allowing firefighters to change out of their uniforms without carrying carcinogens or other materials from fire scenes into the living areas of the station.
Martin said this is important because those combustible materials have been shown to contribute to cancer rates.
“It’s like when you go to a campfire and your clothes smell like the campfire,” Martin said. “But those things we smell like can involve burning plastic and other things that are hazardous.”
The new station also has technology that will help with sleep. Firefighters and paramedics work a 24-hour shift and are often woken up throughout the night for emergency dispatches, even those calls to which only one or two people on the shift would be responding.
“Every time you get woken up, that’s an adrenaline dump in your body,” Martin said. “Over 30 years of doing it, that has an impact on your cardiac health.”
Technology in the station allows the staff to designate which dormitory room belongs to them at the start of each shift and what piece of fire equipment they will be working on: the engine, the rescue truck or the medic ambulance.
Martin said the technology then alerts only the staff needed for each run by sending the emergency dispatches only into those dorm rooms, allowing those not needed to continue to sleep.
The benefits of the health features will not be immediately seen or known, Martin said, but could pay dividends down the road.
“It’s not something we’ll see results from for maybe 20 years,” he said. “But we want health and safety to be a top priority.” bbruner@dispatch.com @bethany_bruner