It’s the simplest part of any academic year.
On an August morning, schools unlock and are quickly filled with the rush of students seeking old friends and new classrooms.
But the coronavirus has obliterated any sense of routine, sending districts around the state marching headlong into the unknown. School buildings shut down since a March 15 executive order by Gov. Henry McMaster are reopening under different schedules and instruction models.
“In more than 40 years in education, I have never seen a school year like the one we just completed,” is how Lexington School District Two Superintendent William James Jr. put it to parents recently.
And the upcoming year will be just as remarkable, with facilities adding safety measures to prevent spread of disease. Things like mandated face coverings on school buses. Water bottle filling stations in lieu of common drinking areas. Partitioned desks spaced six-feet apart. And of course, personal protective equipment for teachers, support staff and other personnel. On July 31, state Superintendent Molly Spearman required everyone entering a school to wear a face covering.
Some 110,000 students in seven Lexington and Richland County districts will start their 2020-21 educational experiences between late August and early September.
Free Times plunged into the situations surrounding their reopening plans, which encompass 167 schools.
What we found were parents both fearful and confident; administrators undeterred by a once-in-a-generation disruption to the American public school system; and students anxious for a return to cafeterias and band practices.
There are also some common threads: Delayed start dates, virtual learning options to open the year and extraordinary safety measures inside facilities to promote social distancing among them.
Two teachers at Chapin middle hold up a signs outside of Spring Hill high school before a special-called meeting of the Board of Trustees on July 23.
And none are following McMaster’s recommendation to offer five days a week of in-classroom teaching from the first day of the school year for all students districtwide, though Lexington Three (Batesburg-Leesville) does offer a full week for K-5 students from opening day. Most local districts begin with hybrid models mixing in-person with online classes.
All plans must be approved by the state Department of Education, and Spearman said reentry strategies must include some form of face-to-face instruction and an in-person orientation.
On July 30, her agency approved back-to-school plans for Lexington’s four districts and Lexington-Richland 5, which straddles the two counties, while Richland One saw its plan approved the following day.
Richland One
The district quickly created an internet brand as a task force convened over the past several weeks to develop a return to school strategy.
The final recommendations of its Restart Strong team were rolled into a July 21 presentation that has students starting with online learning and then blending in classroom time, with the hopes of eventually bringing K-5 students back full time once district officials consider conditions safe.
The district also has a year-long virtual school choice, combining real-time instruction with independent offline assignments.
Calvin, Bryson and Blake Sheppard, install a glass partition to the front desk at Riverbank Elementary School on July 30.
“When we began this process of trying to come up with a reopening schools plan for Richland One, we came into this with the goal of developing a plan that could be adapted for a safe reopening and that could evolve based on science and circumstances,” Sandra Brossard, the district’s chief of learning and teaching, says.
Starting Aug. 31, two weeks later than would normally be planned, the district’s 23,000 students are set to learn from home with a virtual curriculum that includes daily attendance and coursework based on state standards.
District officials say this organized approach is far removed from the improvisation of the spring, when schools patched together internet-based plans following McMaster’s decree, which came the day before all schools statewide had to close their doors.
Brossard says teachers have undergone training and will create lesson plans, while parents can access tutorials to get them comfortable with the technology.
“This is school as usual, except school is going to be in a virtual format,” Brossard said.
And with a later start date will come an extension of the district’s summer meals program. Initially set to lapse on July 27, officials will keep it in place through Aug. 10.
A teacher survey distributed over the summer found that 75 percent of Richland One teachers preferred either an all-virtual or hybrid academic year over five days of in-person instruction.
Spearman approved Richland One’s plans with a caveat. The in-person option, which brings students back part-time, must start no later than Sept. 14, meaning the district should be virtual-only for just two weeks.
Students will be split into two groups. Each will get two days weekly of in-person learning, with one group coming in Monday and Tuesday, and the rest attending Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is set aside for a deep cleaning of classrooms, buses and other shared spaces.
While district officials say they hope to eventually bring in elementary students five-days-a-week as soon as possible, middle and high school students will remain on a two-days-a-week schedule until a "phase 3" level is met, where disease transmission is considered to be low. Social distancing requirements make it difficult to get enough separation within those classrooms, district officials explain.
“Participation in the phase-in model really indicates that you have a goal as a parent of getting your child back to some sense of normalcy where they’ll have an opportunity to interact in a social way with peers,” Brossard says.
District leaders will rely on the state Department of Health and Environmental Control and other data sources to determine when elementary students could be brought in full-time.
Whether students commit to a year’s worth of web-based learning or at least some days in the classroom, all will be eligible to take part in extracurricular activities at their schools.
Richland Two
From its proposed Aug. 31 start date to the educational options made available for students, Richland Two’s back-to-school strategy mirrors Richland One, with an online launch and eventual changeover to a hybrid calendar.
Ideally, five days of in-person tutelage will take place before next summer, but science and epidemiology will guide that decision, district leaders say. They’re waiting for the state’s approval.
That approval will likely come with the same caveat Spearman’s given other districts that didn’t set a date for starting their in-person model — that is, students must return at least part-time by the Monday after Labor Day, Sept. 14.
Pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classes would be clustered into “communities,” or smaller groups that travel together for recess, meals and other in-school activities, while sixth through 12th graders would come to classes on designated days if enrolled in the hybrid program.
Most district parents made it clear in comments to board members that they wanted to keep children out of classrooms until infection rates start to fall consistently.
Kamran Koranloo, a physician and Richland Two parent, favored some in-person class days eventually but wanted only-online lessons to kick off the year.
“Virtual teaching proved to be ineffective in the spring nationwide but in my opinion they are safest way to start,” Koranloo said.
The district has created R2ESCHOOL, a yearlong online academy that targets students who excelled at remote learning in the spring or live in households with medically vulnerable people.
PPE will continue to be required for students at East Point Academy during the coming school year.
Some parents wanted to know whether teachers who contract COVID-19 would be required to use personal sick days during quarantine and how mask mandates would be enforced should in-person classes resume. Other parents, like Robert Ford, said anything short of five-day, in-person schooling imperils his household finances.
“My wife and I have been lucky to work through this pandemic, and really need for both our kids to be in school. Not having face-to-face instruction five days a week will put our family with an impossible choice, to work and put food on our table or one of us quit so we can stay home and educate our children,” he says. “I don’t want anyone to force their kid to go back to school if their parents are uncomfortable doing so … but not everyone is able to make that choice.”
James Ann Lynch Sheley, the district’s assistant superintendent for academics, headed the reopening task force. In a pair of surveys sent to constituents and staff gauging their comfort level heading back to school, 70 percent of parents with children in grades six through 12 said they were either “uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” at the notion, which influenced the decision to offer either a fully virtual or hybrid option.
Middle and high school students will be the last to transition back to a traditional five-day classroom setting.
Prior to the pandemic, a typical day inside the district’s middle and high schools could see pupils changing classrooms up to seven times.
“The tracking of a student’s COVID exposure to others would be nearly impossible,” Sheley says.
To that end, expect each school to have separate accommodations for students who need medical attention, says Dawn McAdams, the district’s lead nurse. A skinned knee or scheduled medication regimen will take place in one room, with another reserved for anybody showing signs of COVID-19-like illness.
Any student or staff member sent home for suspicion of COVID-19 won’t be allowed back until they’ve tested negative or provide proof their health condition was unrelated to the virus.
The Lexington-Richland School District Five Board of Trustees held a special-called board meeting at Spring Hill High School on July 23, on their proposed plans for 2020-2021 school year.
Lexington-Richland 5
Standing outside Spring Hill High School in Chapin on a sweltering July evening, a mask-clad Daniel Rhodes says he’s anxious to walk back into Chapin Intermediate School.
He misses his friends and wants to continue learning how to play the viola.
“I want to go play my instrument again, and you’ve got to do that at school, but I don’t really know if I want to go there and be exposed, or if I want to stay home,” Rhodes, 11, says.
He was among a group of about 40 who urged district leaders through a protest to reject a five-day, in-person scheduling option from day one. As he spoke, chants of “virtual until safe” grew around him.
Just a few hours later, officials announced plans to scuttle a five-day-a-week start to the year, instead offering a hybrid plan as its in-person option for the first month.
It was a stark policy reversal for the district of more than 16,500 students, which as recently as mid-July was mulling a full week of classroom sessions once the academic year begins on Sept. 8.
“Things have changed,” Superintendent Christina Melton said in announcing the altered format. “This is the most difficult presentation that I have given in my career so far, but I want you to know I take this responsibility very seriously.”
Just like Richland County’s main two districts, students here will have the chance to learn remotely for the year. But they can also enroll in a hybrid track that would start them off with two days of in-person instruction, with a shift to five days no sooner than Oct. 8.
Samantha Morton, a physician and parent of an 11th grader in the district, supports five-day learning from the start of the year.
“Many of us had a lot of difficulty with education to our kids [at home]. Our kids need our teachers. Our teachers need to be available to our kids to allow our children to learn appropriately,” she says.
Lexington One
Erica Barnes and Rome Lindler stood before the district’s governing board last month with a plea.
“For those of us who want our kids to be in school, give us the opportunity,” said Barnes, parent to an incoming junior at River Bluff High School.
Without access to campus, Barnes said her daughter will miss critical benchmarks in her life, from participating in sports to the intangible experiences that come with learning alongside peers.
“I think structure is important. I think socialization is critical,” Barnes said. “We understand the risks. But if they’re not in school, they’re not going to be at home social distancing from everybody.”
Barnes’ daughter and other students in this district are getting the chance to return to school from the first day of the year, at least on a part-time basis. Officials plan to assess the state’s disease landscape after a month and decide if five days worth of classroom instruction is possible.
“By using the hybrid model during our transition period, we’re able to practice our safety protocols and make any tweaks necessary within the first month of school,” says Natalie Osborn Smith, Lexington One’s professional learning coordinator. “Ultimately, having this helps us track the impact of COVID-19 and quarantines in our school before moving ahead with a five-day model.”
That’s no small feat for a district with more than 27,000 students and 4,000 staff members.
Beginning Aug. 31, students in all grades who don’t opt into the yearlong virtual learning track will spend two days in school, broken up into A and B groups. Fridays are set aside for online office hours and internet-based instruction for all.
In addition to mandatory mask rules, hourly hand washings are being mandated, as well as socially distanced desk placements.
“Our goal has always been to maximize instructional time with students while keeping our students and staff safe,” Smith offers.
Lindler lamented that he wouldn’t have a chance to send his son back into the classroom for five days starting immediately.
“One of the safest places for these kids to be is in the classroom,” he said. “What are all the other things that can happen to kids while they are home and not in school for those three days? How many of them are being abused? Accidental poisonings?”
Lexington Two, Three and Four
Lexington Two will see students come back Sept. 8, also under a hybrid plan, with two days in school and three days virtual.
But the district is taking other measures, too. It bought misting devices for every school and bus — disinfectant machines to be used after every route and throughout the school day.
A five-day week is the goal, but district Superintendent William James Jr. says it remains too early to put a date on that.
On March 14, Lexington County Three staged a production of The Wizard of Oz, part of a celebration marking this small district’s centennial anniversary. It turned out to be a whimsical goodbye, as South Carolina schools shuttered the following day.
The long return back to normalcy for Lexington County Three begins Aug. 31, with five-day classroom options for primary and elementary school students. Those attending the district’s middle and high schools are following a hybrid model: two days in class, three days at home. Officials also created a fully virtual model.
Lexington Four students will begin their year earlier than others in the Midlands, with an Aug. 17 start date for either virtual or hybrid learning tracks.
Officials are working to keep wraparound and support services intact, offering meals at dedicated locations and continuing to run athletic and extracurricular activities.
