Schools take different approaches to reopening and distance learning

The night before the first day of in-person instruction for elementary students in San Diego County’s Poway Unified School District, principals sent families detailed instructions on how to drop off their children.

The following Thursday morning, “welcome back” balloons adorned campuses’ front gates and school employees took students’ temperatures as they waited inside their parents’ cars. Principals from other schools in the district watched the process unfold, looking for processes they could implement at their own soon-to-reopen schools.

So began for Poway the hybrid learning experiment playing out across the country.

In Poway, one of the largest California school districts to attempt reopening campuses, elementary students learning in person will attend their school in cohorts for part of each weekday — either morning or afternoon — and learn asynchronously, or on their own, the rest of the school day. Families also have the choice to keep their students in full-time remote learning programs.

All of Poway’s 26 elementary schools will be open for a hybrid learning option Oct. 12. While the smaller continuation high school will launch its hybrid program this week — kids will alternate days on campus — still to be determined is how the district of more than 36,000 students will bring back its middle- and high-school students on campuses.

“It’s not even that you’re building the plane as you’re flying,” Marian Kim Phelps, Poway’s superintendent, said. “We’re actually flying the plane and inventing what we’re building as we’re going.”

As more California schools gain permission from the state to offer in-person instruction, they are grappling with a massive logistical puzzle: How, exactly, do you operate schools within schools, where some students attend classes in person in some form while others learn remotely full-time?

Giving families the option to choose between a hybrid, or blended, model — meaning students split their time learning on campus and at home — and full-time remote learning appears to be the course that many of the state’s school districts are charting toward.

Some of that is born out of necessity. The state signaled this summer that schools would likely have to implement some form of hybrid scheduling in order to reduce class sizes and implement the social distancing and safety measures that help mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.

The plans to give families a choice also reflect the fact that, in any given community across the state, there are widely diverging thoughts from families and educators on when, how and if schools should physically reopen.

“We have parents on one end of the spectrum begging us to reopen the schools, and we have parents clearly on the other side saying it is absolutely foolish to open the schools. And then there’s a whole bunch of people in between,” said Jim Hanlon, an assistant superintendent in Chico Unified.

The largest school district in Butte County has tentatively circled Oct. 19 as its transition date toward a hybrid learning option. Hanlon said while it’s not possible to satisfy everyone in the community, the district plans to “offer options where everyone along that spectrum can have a choice that they’re at least OK with.”

Adding to the complexity, the preferences from teachers and parents do not neatly align in some Poway campuses, Phelps said, noting that at one campus, 80% of staff want to return in person, compared with 40% of families at that school.

Meanwhile, secondary schools present an altogether different challenge in a district the size of Poway’s because older students have multiple teachers, likely requiring a different approach from elementary schools. One possibility could be “simultaneous learning,” Phelps said, in which teachers instruct a cohort of students in person while another group of pupils tune into lessons online at home.

“It’s not even that you’re building the plane as you’re flying. We’re actually flying the plane and inventing what we’re building as we’re going.” — Marian Kim Phelps, Poway Unified School District