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Planning Underway To Reopen Massachusetts Schools In The Fall

School bus
Pat Bradley/WAMC

 

    Public school buildings in Massachusetts will remain closed at least until fall. But what then? School officials are looking at a number of daunting challenges to reopening amid the pandemic. 

  There will be no in-person summer school term in the largest public school district in western Massachusetts. When Springfield’s 26,000 students and 4,000 teachers and staff members might return to school buildings is an open question, said Mayor Domenic Sarno.

  "Is our goal to be open for fall?" Sarno said. " That would be great."

   The city’s 60 school buildings might need physical changes before students and staff could be safely welcomed back.

" Schools were not built to be socially distant," Sarno said.

  Springfield is not alone in trying to figure out what school might look like. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has created a 44-person working group of educators, administrators, and public health experts to come up with guidelines for reopening school.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has recommendations that include less moving about in school, no field trips or extracurricular activities, meals eaten in classrooms, and each school maintaining an isolation room to quarantine anyone who develops COVID-19 symptoms.

School administrators will need to schedule time for frequent hand-washing.

"The decision to close was a very hard decision, but the planning around reopening is going to require a tremendous amount of effort and we have a team working on it," said Springfield Superintendent of Schools Dan Warwick. 

The challenges to returning to school start at the bus stop.

"We put 60-65 students on a bus, but you can probably put 12-15 safely, so how do we get our students to and from school?"  Warwick said. 

  It might be necessary to have staggered schedules for students and teachers. Some students might attend school only in the mornings, or in the afternoons, or on alternate days, or every other week.   Some remote learning is likely to continue.

"Certainly we are not going to be able to have 20-25 students in a classroom," said Warwick.

 For now, the Springfield school department is not planning to collect the laptop computers it distributed to students for use at home back in March.

  Typically about 5,000 students take summer school classes in Springfield. A full complement of summer school programs, taught remotely, will be held, according to Warwick. 

He said to help overcome the learning loss that came with transition to remote learning earlier this year, the schools will have a city-wide program that will include project-based activities for all students and their families.

  Remote graduation ceremonies will be held for Springfield’s eight high schools during the first two weeks in June. 

  Also, each high school is holding an in-person graduation. Students will be able to come one at a time, go up on stage to pick up their diploma and have photos taken with immediate family members.

The record-setting tenure of Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno. The 2011 tornado and its recovery that remade the largest city in Western Massachusetts. The fallout from the deadly COVID outbreak at the Holyoke Soldiers Home. Those are just a few of the thousands and thousands of stories WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill has covered for WAMC in his nearly 17 years with the station.
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