As the numbers of COVID-19 cases and precautionary quarantines among Bulloch County Schools students and employees have risen, some parents who chose face-to-face school for their children have asked to switch to the virtual option.

But virtual schooling presents its own challenges, and the number of children whose families have asked to make a change in the opposite direction, from virtual to face-to-face, has actually been a little higher, at least among those who completed written applications. Changes are being approved only for “absolute hardship” situations, Assistant Superintendent for School Improvement Teresa Phillips told the Board of Education.

“Everybody wants to make the right choice for their child, and there’s just a lot of uncertainty,” Phillips said Thursday evening. “If we allow a lot of movement and continue to go back and forth, it ends up disrupting the environment for our children.”

Her office had received 346 applications to return students from virtual instruction to face-to-face school and 324 applications to pull students out of face-to-face school and place them in virtual instruction, she reported.

Deadline weeks ago

Except for new arrivals, students and their parents or guardians were asked to choose between the virtual option and traditional school for fall semester before the delayed start of the school year.  After some previous extensions, the final deadline to change options with no questions asked was Aug.  10, one week before classes started.

Before that deadline, about 200 of the district’s nearly 700 teachers had volunteered or been assigned to virtual teaching, while the rest remained in traditional classrooms.  Administrators then assigned students to specific teachers while aiming to balance class sizes and keep the ratio of students to virtual teachers within the district’s guidelines, Phillips explained.

The target maximums were 35 students per virtual program teacher, all day, in kindergarten and first grade, 45 students in second and third grades and up to 55 students in fourth and fifth grades. For sixth through 12th grades, a teacher may have up to 35 students each class, up to six class periods a day.

The school system is using two interactive online platforms, Edgenuity for sixth through 12th grades and SchoolsPLP for kindergarten through fifth grade, as the main sources of instruction for students in the virtual program. But Bulloch County Schools teachers assigned to monitor the students’ progress and provide supplemental lessons and activities over services such as Google Meets and Google Classroom.

“We’re already at our maximum numbers in both cases for the virtual program,” Phillips told the board. “So, when that kindergarten teacher is already looking at 35 and here come 10 more, we have nowhere for them to go. We have to end up pulling a teacher from the face-to-face classroom and redistributing to serve those 10 students.”

Two-week report

Phillips and Kelly Spence, executive director of curriculum and instruction, narrated a slideshow on the progress of the virtual program and challenges encountered in the first two weeks. They also talked about the separate effort to provide “distance learning” connections for face-to-face students and teachers who go into 14-day quarantine.

A majority of the technical problems encountered with both platforms and the connecting service ClassLink have been resolved, but a few remain to be worked out, according to Spence and Phillips.

They also discussed efforts to support teachers and parents who are still learning to work with children in virtual instruction and said some parents, especially those with several children, are feeling overwhelmed.

“What if a parent says, ‘It’s just not working for my child. My child wasn’t working on grade level; now that he or she is on the virtual program, they have to keep up?’” asked school board member Maurice Hill. “What if that parent says, I’m overwhelmed and I just have to send my child back to school? Could he or she send that child back to school, or will they have to wait to next semester?”

Hardship reasons that could justify a change away from virtual instruction include unstable internet  service  or job change that takes the parent away from home during  the day with no child care available, Spence  said.

Interviewed after the meeting, Phillips said one hardship justification for a change from face-to-face school to virtual instruction would be if a student develops a medical condition requiring them to stay home. Another would be the presence of someone else in the home, such as a parent or grandparent, who has a condition that makes them medically fragile.

“If they have documentation showing that, then they would be allowed to go virtual,” she said.

Now homeschooling

Sarah Donaldson, who has seven grandchildren, three of whom were at Stilson Elementary School, told the Statesboro Herald that the youngest of them, a second-grader, became very upset upon hearing that  COVID-19 touched the school.

“I mean he was crying, making himself sick, throwing up, because he was scared to go to school because of COVID,” Donaldson said. “Well, we didn’t know at the time that they’d already sent home a whole classroom, a second-grade classroom.”

She said her family learned about the quarantines from parents of children who were sent home.

Her daughter then kept all three children out of the school. But when she contacted the board office to request a change to virtual instruction, they were told this was not a good enough reason, Donaldson said.

The reporter told her about the medical hardship reasons Phillips had mentioned, and Donaldson described serious health conditions she said two family members have. But by Friday she and her daughter had purchased books for homeschooling, and Donaldson said she is now her grandchildren’s teacher.

“I’m very disappointed in this school system, very disappointed,” Donaldson said. “I love Stilson Elementary. I love all the teachers there; they’re excellent. It’s nothing to do with that school. It’s to do with the board.”

In the first two weeks of school, Stilson Elementary had six confirmed cases of COVID-19, the most of any school in the county system, resulting in 63 people, which could include school employees as well as students, being sent home for precautionary quarantine.

All-virtual threshold?

By Thursday night, there had been 25 coronavirus cases confirmed in the school system, resulting in precautionary quarantine of more than 300 individuals. Asked if there is some number at which he and the board would discontinue in-person school and go to an all virtual and distance-learning approach, Bulloch County Schools Superintendent Charles Wilson said there is no predetermined threshold.

He noted that they had from the outset an “adaptive” plan, including the use of distance learning to keep quarantined students and teachers connected to their classes. But he, Phillips and Spence all said they hadn’t expected to be using distance learning to this extent so soon.

“We believe between the preparations we’ve made as well as the attitude of our teachers, we’re going to meet our students where we need to meet them,” Wilson said.  “So we’re planning for Chromebook distribution and trying to provide the opportunity for that child to be out of the class, continue with their learning so that when they show back up after two weeks we can continue to move forward.”

Wilson said the number of people quarantined also reflects a very cautious approach the school system has adopted in contact tracing and following Department of Public Health guidelines.