For some Idaho students, the new school week is two days long. Parents are overwhelmed.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, Rocio Aguilar and her husband leave their three children at home in Ketchum and depart for their respective jobs — she works as a housekeeper, and her husband removes snow in the winter and works as a landscaper in the summer. Aguilar hopes her youngest will have completed whatever assignments he has that day by the time she and her husband return from work that night.

Aguilar lives in the Blaine County School District, and under BCSD’s hybrid-learning plan, her two school-aged children attend school two days per week. The district has split each classroom into two groups that attend school on alternating days — some Monday and Wednesday, others Tuesday and Thursday. On the off days, Aguilar’s two older daughters, ages 13 and 18, are responsible for assisting their 6-year-old brother with his assignments — if he has any.

He receives no live instruction from a teacher three days per week — under district policy, there’s no mandated minimum amount of synchronous or asynchronous learning required on days students are home, according to BCSD Trustee Lara Stone. The first two weeks of school, he brought home only one worksheet to do on his off days, Aguilar said.

“I know my primary responsibility is to help my son learn,” Aguilar said in Spanish. “So I’ve been trying to download books and find more educational materials to give him on the off days, but I’m not a teacher and I can’t sit with him all day. I have to go to work.”

Aguilar is one of many parents across the BCSD struggling with the district’s hybrid-learning plan. Some told the Idaho Statesman their kids are receiving extremely limited online education on their off days. Even as athletics, extracurricular programs and private schools around the district operate fully in person, public schools remain at limited capacity.

The district has left it up to schools to decide how to facilitate learning amid the two-days-on, three-days-off schedule, Stone said. While some parents interviewed by the Statesman said their children were receiving an hour of livestreamed teaching on off days, others, like Aguilar, say their kids do not have any interaction with their teachers when they’re not physically in school — for them, they say, the school week is two days long. And they’re afraid their kids are falling behind.

The plan, known as “Plan B,” has been in place since Sept. 8, the first day of school. BCSD trustees voted Sept. 21 to extend the plan, citing a recent rise in cases in Blaine County.

Throughout the pandemic, the district has taken some of the strictest measures in the state to curb the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of following South Central Public Health’s risk-level determination, the district has opted to follow the more-stringent Harvard Global Health metrics for COVID suppression, which places Blaine County in an orange risk level.

The school system, according to data shared at the Sept. 21 meeting, has seen four confirmed positive cases since the first day of school — two staff members and two students. Nine staff and 27 students are either quarantining or isolating.

“Our goal with starting in the hybrid plan is to be able to ease into all in-person learning without having an outbreak that would force us to shift to all remote learning like we’ve seen happen in other counties and states,” Stone said.

Schools remain in hybrid mode as athletics go in person

During the Sept. 21 meeting, most trustees stressed that the orange risk level made reopening — or scaling up to “Plan A” — unfeasible. But one trustee, Amber Larna, echoed the concerns of parents the Statesman spoke with. In her eyes, Plan B does little to curb the spread of COVID-19, especially if students are still participating in district athletics and spending time with friends on off days. Larna was the sole “nay” vote at the meeting, voting against continuing with Plan B.

“I don’t think that Plan B is the answer in regards to mitigation or suppression of COVID-19,” said Larna, whose son plays football for the district. Even on his “off days,” Larna said her son heads to school at 3 p.m. for football practice, where he plays, unmasked.

Since the Harvard metrics found the district in an orange zone, district teams have played one another rather than teams from other school districts. Stone said that athletics have been proceeding in a safe fashion and athletic directors have worked with local medical experts to find a way to allow practices and games to proceed without increasing spread.

“BCSD has the most stringent athletic guidelines in the state — by far,” Stone wrote in an email to the Statesman.

Still, parents expressed concern that students were spending off days playing and socializing, not necessarily following the strict precautions in place at school. Brie Jensen, a mother of three students in the district, said her son’s football team does not wear masks during games. She also pointed to local private schools, like the Sun Valley Community School and the Sage School, which have opened for in-person schooling, five days a week.

At the Sept. 21 board meeting, BCSD Superintendent GwenCarol Holmes urged families and students to follow social distancing guidelines outside of school, mentioning she had recently seen eight middle school kids crowded around a small table at Starbucks, sharing drinks with each other while unmasked.

“If the community does not do this and if our students do not do this outside of school, it will do us very little good,” Holmes said.

‘If we’re struggling, everyone’s struggling’

Jensen’s daughter and Aguilar’s son are in first grade, but their experiences under Plan B differ significantly.

When the Ernest Hemingway STEAM school canceled its dual-immersion program last year, Aguilar, who speaks Spanish at home, moved her son to Alturas Elementary. But now, because of the school’s approach to online learning, she fears his English and Spanish language skills aren’t developing at the pace they should.

Aguilar’s son completes worksheets and assignments on his off days, but he only talks to his teachers two days a week. Melissa Servin, secretary of Alturas Elementary, where Aguilar’s child attends, confirmed that students are receiving no synchronous instruction on off days, and also said students are learning no new material when they’re not physically in school.

Document cameras have been provided to every teacher in the district to livestream and record content for students at home, according to Stone, but Alturas has not yet provided any such programming for students, according to Servin. The school is planning on holding “check-in” meetings with students on Fridays through Google Classroom, but this has not yet happened.

Unable to find an online school that was still accepting applications and offered a dual-immersion program, Aguilar contacted Alturas to see if she could enroll her son in school four days a week — that way, he could move forward with both his languages, and her daughters wouldn’t have to take care of him and supervise his schooling on Mondays and Wednesdays.

“They told me they were only letting kids with learning difficulties come to school,” Aguilar said. “But I told them, in two or three months, that will be my son.”

Students whose parents work outside the home every day do not qualify to attend school four days a week, Stone said, writing that BCSD schools would not be able to accommodate all these students while maintaining physical distance. She wrote that some students whose parents can’t supervise their learning have enrolled in programs offered by the YMCA, the Blaine County Recreation District and Idaho Base Camp.

Jensen’s youngest daughter, meanwhile, attends a pod learning group with several other students that Jensen and her husband are paying for. Jensen and her husband can work from home, and they’ve elected to take “shifts” with their other two kids, who go to Hemingway, to supervise learning on off days.

“To get any value out of what they’re doing on their off days, they need to have some feedback on the material that they’re doing instantly,” she said.

While the students don’t get synchronous instruction, they have “social and emotional check-ins” with teachers at the start of their off days, Jensen said.

Even with her youngest attending a pod learning group and the flexibility her job allows, off days have been difficult for Jensen — balancing work and schooling has proven tricky, her daughter is often in tears over math assignments without a teacher there to guide her, and establishing a routine with three kids in the system has been near impossible. Still, Jensen said her struggles were far fewer than those of other families, who may not have the resources to enroll their kids in additional academic support groups or who, like Aguilar, might have to leave for work during the day.

“We’re struggling like you can’t believe,” Jensen said, “and I just can’t even imagine what it’s like for families for whom English is a second language, or where middle schoolers are staying home and having to take care of the younger students. If we’re struggling, everyone’s struggling.”

Teachers working ‘sunup to sundown’

Parents and trustees underscored their appreciation for teachers and administrators, who Larna said have been working nonstop to facilitate learning under Plan B.

“What I’m hearing from the majority of the teachers that I’ve connected with is how hard Plan B is,” Larna said. “That they’re working from sunup to sundown on lesson plans and trying to figure this all out for two separate classes moving at different speeds in two different formats.”

Jensen agreed.

“I have nothing but empathy and compassion for the teachers,” she said. “I think that they’re totally overburdened by this, having to teach in class and coordinate online learning. I think it’s too much to ask.”

Both trustees said they hoped more teachers would take advantage of the livestreaming option going forward — Larna’s son, a 15-year-old at the Carey School, gets an hour of math class on his off days, because his teacher has been able to livestream her in-person math classes to students at home.

Larna said the trustees left it up to schools to decide how best to provide education on Fridays, and Stone said she believed Fridays were being used for work with “small groups of students, assessing individual students, professional development and training, collaboration among professional learning communities, and to create content for students on remote learning days, among other things.”

Stone indicated she would wait for a decline in case numbers and a “low yellow to green status” before considering opening up elementary schools fully.