This Idaho school district won’t delay opening, has hybrid in-person, at-home plan
The Vallivue School District plans to move ahead with in-person instruction — meaning schools will open — on Aug. 19, despite current Southwest District Health guidance.
In an email to parents, the district announced that all grade levels would return to the classroom, with a few changes, including a four-day school week for elementary students and an alternating A-B schedule for middle and high school students that would mean two days in classrooms.
Southwest District Health currently lists all of Canyon County in Category 3 (red) of Idaho’s back-to-school guidelines. That category comes with a recommendation to close all school buildings and do remote learning. It is not a requirement.
“We feel that with the mitigating factors of requiring all staff and students to wear masks and have as much distancing as we can, having several lunches and keeping students socially distanced in classrooms in other places, they are going to be safer at school than out of school perhaps gathering in large groups and being in situations where not everyone will be wearing a mask as they will be in school,” Vallivue School District Superintendent Pat Charlton told the Idaho Statesman.
According to the plan for secondary students, the A-B schedule option has all students working on academics remotely at home every Monday. Then half the students would attend school on Tuesdays and Thursdays while the other half goes on Wednesdays and Fridays.
At the elementary level, where Charlton says the district believes students are at less risk, all students would work from home on Mondays and go to their schools the other weekdays.
Masks will be a strict requirement for all students and staff, with few exceptions, officials said.
“Students who refuse will be removed from the classroom and parents will have to come and get them, and they will perhaps be set up with online schooling,” Charlton said. “We can’t really make an exception for students who do not want to wear a mask.”
The decision was also affected by the lack of resources, digital and otherwise, among many families, according to Charlton, who said it was a big factor.
“Nampa, Vallivue and Caldwell have the same level of economically disadvantaged people, and a lot of those homes, the parents have to work. They don’t have child care and are generally not prepared to do home-schooling for our population,” Charlton said. “Sixty percent of our students would not be in a good situation doing schooling at home, so we feel they are in a much better situation at least going in two days a week.”
The Vallivue School District has indicated that it will still follow the guidelines for the green, yellow and red codes of Idaho’s back-to-school framework. However, the district is making its own decision on when to move to a new color.
“The Vallivue School Board will make decisions based on guidance from Southwest District Health. If SWDH has identified the county in a specific color phase, that does not necessarily mean the district will operate under the updated SWDH color phase,” writes the district on a FAQ page on its website. “The school board has the final say on which color phase the district will operate.”
Charlton said his impression is that the health district is not explicitly telling districts what they should or should not do, leaving the district open to move at its own pace.
“At this point, it’s red for all of Canyon County, but we don’t have a breakdown on our students,” Charlton said. “That’s another thing we would like to do once school starts, is keep track of our data very closely ourselves.”
According to Carlton, the district could still make a change and decide to start online-only, and will be monitoring the coronavirus spread for the next two weeks.
Last week, the Nampa School District decided to start students online for at least the first two weeks and delay the first day of school. The Caldwell School District plans on an alternate schedule but has opted to delay its opening.
Canyon County continues to be one of Idaho’s coronavirus hot spots, trailing only the more populated Ada County for the highest number of cases in the state, according to the state’s statistics. Before ending the month, Canyon County added three new deaths Friday, for a total of 37. It added 90 new confirmed cases on Sunday, the highest number in the state by far on the day, and its total stands at 4,969 cases.
SWDH, which has Canyon County in the “red” level, will reevaluate every two weeks. Kimberly Beckley, school liaison for SWDH, previously said schools in the state would likely remain in “yellow” or “red” of Idaho’s back-to-school guidelines for the entire year.
