Minnesota schools revamp plans

Dozens of teachers gathered outside Eisenhower Elementary School and the district offices in Hopkins last week, eliciting some honks of approval from cars passing by on Highway 7. The teachers waved signs reading “Educator lives are more important than child care,” and “Safety first. Distance learning will not kill us, but COVID can.”

Keenan Jones, a fourth-grade teacher, said he has been rattled by some of the missteps schools around the country have made as a result of trying to reopen too soon. He doesn’t want his district to make the same mistake.

"We're talking about Notre Dame, one of the top universities, wealthiest universities in the country, and they're having to shut down. So let's just do this in a way where it's effective and everybody is safe. Right now I think distance learning is the safest thing. Every day, there's more and more questions than there are answers,” Jones said.

Hopkins is just one of the many Minnesota districts that are having to re-craft, walk back or change their reopening plans based on rising Covid-19 case rates, budget constraints and pushback from both teachers and parents.

Other districts, like Roseville, Bloomington and Mounds View had planned to open with at least some in-person learning this fall. But in recent days they’ve walked those plans back, telling families that they will only offer distance learning.

Roseville Public Schools communications director, Josh Collins, said the district changed their plans to distance learning out of “concerns for the health and safety of students, families and staff.”

Both families and staff gave Roseville school leaders unexpected feedback. Forty percent of families said they wouldn’t participate in in-person learning, even if offered by the district. And about 75 percent of teachers in the district said they didn’t feel safe or were medically unable to return to in-person work, Collins said

“We have heard from some families that constant uncertainty is difficult, so knowing that this is the plan for at least the first month of school may bring some comfort to those who are trying to plan,” Collins wrote in an email to MPR News.

In Hopkins, the district has worked to involve an array of voices in the planning, with various task forces and surveys seeking input from teachers, students and their families. But sometimes those perspectives are at odds with one another.

The district initially planned to send some of its youngest learners back to the classroom for 4.5 hours during in-person instruction, but recently expanded it to a full 6.5-hour school day after hearing an “overwhelming outcry” from parents, said superintendent Rhoda Mhiripiri-Reed. While teachers wanted those extra hours to prepare for distance learning, many parents were concerned that they couldn’t find childcare.

Vanessa Walters, a special education teacher at Gatewood Elementary School, said many educators don’t feel safe returning to the classroom — and yet their options are limited.

“Teachers have the option of taking a leave, but they don’t want to,” she said. “They love their kids, they want to be there. I don’t know what will happen. We want schools to open, we want them to stay open, so that means we have to be smart about it, and that includes using teacher input.”

Hybrid is the most popular choice for metro-area districts. According to a recent survey from the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, over half of the organization’s 46 members had announced plans to start the academic year in some sort of in-person hybrid scenario. The second most popular choice was distance learning, with 17 districts announcing plans to start the academic year remotely.

Metro-area districts are not the only ones having to rework their plans. Maccray public schools in western central Minnesota had planned to start their schools in full-time in-person learning but had to switch to a hybrid version of learning after COVID-19 case rates rose in their county.

In Minneota Public Schools, also in a western central part of the state, district leaders delayed the start of their school year to Sept. 1 “out of an abundance of caution” after learning a staff member had contracted COVID-19.

Bob Indihar, executive director of the Minnesota Rural Education Association, said he expects to see many more districts change their plans as time goes on.

“It’s gonna be common. People are going to start in one mode and they’re going to have to quickly pivot to another mode, and that’s where a lot of the anxiety is coming from this year,” Indihar said. “People are preparing as best they can and using the data that they’ve got, but the data can change — and when that data changes, they have to change their mode.”

Keep up with the rapidly changing news about state schools under the pandemic at MPRnews.org