Fresno Unified schools have a different plan for bringing students back. What we know

There’s no set date for when Fresno County’s largest school district will reopen for in-person classes, but it will be on a part-time hybrid schedule different from other large local districts whenever students return.

“People will judge this plan and, well, they should,” Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Bob Nelson said during a news conference Thursday. “We think that this represents the best possible plan of any that we’ve seen, and it minimizes the disruption of kids and teachers. It minimizes, to the greatest degree possible, disruption for families whose lives have turned upside down.

“We know this: If a community’s school ain’t right, ain’t nothing right.”

Fresno Unified will continue distance learning until the county reaches the orange Tier 3 in the state’s color-coded “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” of coronavirus safety measures and restrictions. The orange tier represents “moderate” risk levels for spreading COVID-19. To get to the orange tier, positive coronavirus cases would need to dip between 1 and 3.9 daily cases per 100,000.

“Many of the other districts picked an arbitrary date (to reopen for in-person classes),” Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla told The Bee. “If we hit the orange tier, that means people are following guidelines, and we hope that translates into the classroom.”

On Monday, Fresno County slid back to the purple Tier 1 — the most restrictive tier for reopening businesses — after being in the red Tier 2 for almost two months. Still, under state and county guidelines, school districts that opened for in-person classes were allowed to remain open.

“COVID cases in our community are widespread, we’re back in purple,” Trustee Veva Islas said during the news conference. “That is not a hoax; it’s the reality that we’re living. We are in this together, and we need each other to get out of this. This Thanksgiving, please give thanks and not COVID.”

Dozens of school districts in the San Joaquin Valley, including Fresno Unified, have also applied and been approved for a waiver that allows elementary schools to reopen regardless of the number of positive cases in each county.

Fresno Unified does have small cohorts of students going onto all campuses, but students are utilizing the school’s WiFi and are continuing distance learning. Teachers are not teaching students in person.

Small groups of Clovis Unified School District elementary students returned to campuses last month and have been phased back into classrooms slowly, with a near full return of elementary students by Jan. 19. The Sanger Unified School District reopened for in-person elementary school classes on Nov. 2.

All Central Unified School District campuses, except for Madison Elementary School, have also been open for small cohorts of students who have the most need, district Spokesperson Sonja Dosti said in an email. The district is in the process of applying for a waiver, she confirmed.

Last month, Central Unified board members unanimously approved a reopening plan that has elementary students returning to in-person instruction on Jan. 11.

Fresno Unified, the third-largest district in the state, is one of the largest employers in the area, with more than 10,500 employees and about 74,000 students. The district has a responsibility to make sure reopening campuses does not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, said Paul Idsvoog, Fresno Unified’s chief executive of human resources.

“If we do something that creates destruction, then we create destruction for the whole community,” he told The Bee. “If we do something to contribute to the spread of coronavirus, then we contributed to the spread of the whole Valley.”

But in the meantime, when the new semester begins (Jan. 12), Fresno Unified distance learning schedules will change slightly. The new schedules create additional time for virtual live instruction and more planning time for teachers.

Teachers will also have time allotted to work with students who need extra help.

What does the hybrid schedule for elementary students look like?

At Fresno Unified’s office space in downtown Fresno at the Bitwise building on Van Ness, staffers and labor partners have filled up whiteboards with ideas for the part-time hybrid schedules for elementary school students.

“This is an all hands on deck affair,” Nelson said. “All of this has been done collaboratively and that is what’s different from Fresno Unified and some of the other local districts who are doing this work.”

When schools do reopen for in-person classes, the district will bring in elementary students starting with transitional kindergartners through first-graders and phasing in other grades, district Spokesperson Amy Idsvoog said. While at the same time, the district will begin to bring back up to 25% of student enrollment at the secondary level.

The district had whittled it down to two options.

The first option will have two groups of students. Group A will be on campus two days a week, and group B will be on campus the other two days that week.

The second option has group A and group B on campus four days a week every other week. So, group A will be on campus for one week and learn remotely the next week. The week group A learns remotely, group B will be on campus, and the following week will be distance learning.

On Mondays, teachers will have planning time. Students in all grades will be working from home and have at least 30 minutes of live teacher engagement. There is also time set aside for in-person support for small groups of students who need extra help.

The district will try to put siblings together on the same schedule and groups, Nelson said. Teachers will be doing what is called “simultaneous teaching,” he said, which means teaching students in classrooms and online at the same time.

Nelson said teaching that way would help keep students with their same familiar teachers.

“It’s been hard to connect with kids in the virtual environment. You have to really lean in for the engagement factor,” Nelson said. “Assigning them all to a new teacher mid-way through the second semester seems a little irresponsible in our opinion.”

Out of the four largest school districts in the county, Fresno Unified is the only district to offer options where only one group of students are on campus for full days. Clovis Unified and Sanger Unified both adopted the AM/PM model, where one group of students is on campus for around two hours, either in the morning or afternoon.

The district wanted to minimize the number of students at each campus, Bonilla told The Bee, instead of having double the number of students on campus in one day and sanitizing the school in between the morning and afternoon.

With these two hybrid schedules, Amy Idsvoog added, parents also won’t have to pick up their children in the middle of the workday. The schedule could be tweaked as guidelines shift during the pandemic.

Fresno Unified is sending out a survey to parents with children in elementary school on Friday asking which hybrid schedule they would prefer and if they intend to send their children back to campuses.

“This is where we know we need to meet with our parents and talk about what would be easiest for them,” Nelson said. “In this distance learning mode we share teaching with our community in ways that we never had before and our parents are going to have to find adequate coverage for their kids on the off time their kids aren’t physically present back in school every day.”

When will middle and high school students return?

Unlike Fresno Unified elementary students, middle and high school students won’t all be able to return to campuses.

Only secondary students who meet specific criteria will be able to return, Amy Idsvoog said, similar to how Fresno Unified has chosen certain students with the most need to come onto campus for small cohorts. Middle and high schools will only be able to have about 25% of student capacity at a time under social distancing guidelines.

Elementary and secondary schedules differ because scheduling in-person classes for middle and high school students it a lot more complicated, Nelson said. In part, because students have multiple teachers and have to move between classes, he said.

“There’s no way by which we could bring everybody back in totality and have adequate social distancing in order to make sure people were not too close together from a contract tracing perspective,” Nelson said.

Secondary students who meet the district’s criteria to return to campuses can also opt to continue distance learning, Amy Idsvoog added.

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Read more from The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.

This story was originally published November 19, 2020 at 11:11 AM.