St. Vrain school board members did not acknowledge the protests going on outside but yelling and cheering could be heard inside the boardroom.
A group of 20 parents, students and other concerned community members on Wednesday evening rallied outside the St. Vrain Valley School District Educational Services Center to protest SVVSD’s recent decision to begin the school year in an online-only format.
Parents and students repeated “give us a choice” as they urged the school board meeting inside to reconsider its decision and allow students to attend school in person.
The rally was organized via a social media campaign and connections among parents who are upset with the district for not keeping with the part of its mission that speaks to parental partnerships. In this case, parents want the district to poll them to hear what they want.
“We want choice,” said parent Penny Hodges. “We are in phase III in Colorado according to the epidemiologists. To their guidelines that means that we can have hybrid choices at least and we are not being given that choice. The parents were never polled, the kids were never polled and we just feel like we haven’t been heard. Our kids are the ones who are going to carry the burden of this.”
Social media polls have gone out among parents and Hodges said she knows of more than 1,000 families who want a choice.
“They blindsided us and gave us no clue they were headed in this direction. And they won’t even talk about it,” said a parent who voiced her concern to the board but refused to give her name.
Many participants at the rally were reluctant to provide their names for fear their students might be impacted by their words.
Parents said they have reached out to the district on several occasions and received an automated message from Superintendent Don Haddad thanking them for writing and voicing their concerns. Dr. Don Haddad, in a phone call Thursday morning stated that he responds to all of his email and "has never used an automated message in his life."
Parents and students attended a rally Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, to urge the St. Vrain Valley school board to reconsider the online-only start to the school year.(Photo by Macie May)Many at the rally said they also wrote to the board to voice their concerns. But several parents who wished they could address the board live said their inability to speak at the meeting compounded their feelings of not being heard. One parent said the only communication on the school reopening topic was in a July 28 Longmont Leader Q&A with Haddad.
Hodges and other parents are concerned about the learning environment their children will face. One parent, who did not give her name, figured her high school student would spend an hour and 10 minutes a week learning math from a teacher and 25 hours a week learning through independent study.
The consensus among attendees was that no one wanted to force an overarching decision on anyone else but they wanted a choice to send their students to school.
With online-only learning, students will be sitting at home where there are many distractions while teachers are allowed to go back into a work environment, Hodges said. She said she is concerned students will be less likely to have a quality education in such an environment.
Other parents were concerned with the ability of students to learn at the pace and level they would in class. At a July 22 special school board meeting, Jeff Zayach, executive director of Boulder County Public Health, said some students have lost the equivalent of a school year of education since in-person learning stopped in March. That statement has parents even more concerned about the impact on learning if students do not return to classrooms until October. The district plans to stick to online-only learning through the end of September.
Tara Menza has five children in school this year, three of whom have special needs, and her family is opting to enroll in Twin Peaks Charter Academy.
Twin Peaks plans to offer full-time, in-person learning for elementary students, while secondary students will attend in-person classes every other day and learn from home on alternating days.
Matthew Menza holds a sign at the Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, rally to urge the St. Vrain Valley school board to reconsider the online-only start to the school year.(Photo by Macie May)“No one knows their child better than their parent and our five children cannot learn from a computer screen. They need social interaction and classroom experience for many developmental reasons. Pulling our children out of the mainstream St. Vrain school system in light of their recent decision to go online-only with no other option to parents and students, and placing them in a charter school that can properly teach and support the needs of our children, and mitigate the risk of COVID-19 is an easy choice for us,” Menza said via text message Wednesday night. Her son, Lucas Menza, is entering seventh grade this year and said, “On full day school, I think (in-person) is the best and only way to learn because I say now that I am physically and mentally incapable of doing online work anymore. I get nothing done. … Being at the facility where you learn, having social interaction and being able to be with your peers and your teachers to ask questions is a whole different experience. … Online work, I might as well just go to YouTube and search how to do math and get more out of that.”
William Rich, a high school senior this year, said “I think it will really hurt us, especially when it comes to academics in our freshman year of college because we will be way behind and not knowing all the essential stuff you learn senior year in most subjects.”
Hodges said the district seems to have lost its focus on its students and their opinions have been lost in the decision-making process.
“I actually wrote this to the board and said that ‘this is bigger than an individual to come up with a solution.’ We need to sit down with the teachers, we need to sit down with the board, we need to sit down with the parents and collectively come up with a solution that would work for (students),” she said. “But we do need to look at this from their point of view. They’re the ones who are carrying the burden of having to do all this and I don’t think they have been considered once.”
She said she was initially willing to “just go with the flow” but “there were two things that fired me up. In two board meetings they didn’t mention the kids once, not once. And then when they said that the day they were going to go back it is the student count day. I’m like ‘so you care about the money but you don’t care about what’s going to happen to our kids at home.’”
Another mother, who did not provide her name, also questioned the potential return date. She said other parents were considering making sure their students are absent on Oct. 1, the day enrollment is counted to determine state funding.
The issue of October Count day was addressed in the July 8 school board meeting through a resolution titled 2020-2021 Educational Process. The resolution granted the district the ability to count attendence both online or in-school. The attendenance would also count for "October 1 Student Count and funding documentation," according to the resolution.
“That worries me too because we need fully funded schools, so we need to get them back (into the classroom),” said the mother of high school students.
Superintendent Don Haddad told board members the district has tried to meet the needs of every group as it responds to the COVID-19 threat.
“Our staff has worked really hard and they have made sacrifices as have the students, but we haven’t been able to accommodate every request,” he said. “We are really trying to do our best to acknowledge the hardships to the teachers, staff and parent community.”
The district must adhere to both state and county health guidelines, and those guidelines can change rapidly as the district responds to how the virus is impacting the community, Haddad said.
“Opening is one thing and then being able to stay open is something else,” he said. “We have to pay attention to positive cases, pay attention to probable cases and then we have to pay attention to illnesses.”
However, parents gathered Wednesday outside the board meeting said they feel the district has done a more than adequate job of addressing health and safety concerns of students while they are in buildings. They also are upset the district is willing to allow students to attend the Community School program, but is making no allowances for students who need the school environment to learn.
The district has expanded the Community School child care program to all of its elementaries and will offer full-day care from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Students are “expected to bring their iPads or other class materials to access their remote/online learning. Staff will be able to support students with their online learning,” according to information posted on the district website.
“What is the difference,” asked one parent of a high school student who refused to give her name.
Jackie Kapushion, the district’s deputy superintendent, said teachers are better prepared to deliver direct instruction in real time when classes begin Aug. 18 than they were when schools were closed in the spring.
Teachers took part in thousands of hours of development to engage students in an online environment, Kapushion said. Each morning, parents of elementary students can log in for a discussion with a teacher to discuss what their child will accomplish during the day, she said.
Direct instruction will go for about 35 minutes followed by some independent work time, Kapushion said.
“But we are cognizant of screen time,” she said. “Our elementary students will have no more than two hours of screen time with teachers. Older students will have a little bit more. But we do not want to keep students online for the full seven hours.”
-Monte Whaley contributed to this report.
*Update: Clarification made on SVVSD's policy on October 1 Student Count day.
