Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 11/12/2020
HAMPDEN/WILBRAHAM – Superintendent Al Ganem took time out of his superintendent’s report at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District (HWRSD) Nov. 5 meeting to congratulate the teachers and administration at Soule Road School and Green Meadows School for the successful transition of grades four and five to a synchronous learning model. He said that educators are always looking for ways to improve learning for students.
As part of that search for improvement, the district sent a message out to the families of kindergarteners in the district to assess the desire for four-day per week in-person instruction. Ganem reported that the majority of parents and caregivers expressed an inclination to make than transition. He called kindergarten “a crucial age and very difficult to do remotely.”
Ganem said that aside from eliminating remote learning difficulties at the kindergarten level, in-person instruction would increase the sense of connection between students and their teachers, classmates and school community.
The logistics of such a move would include the conversion of a portion of the library at Green Meadows and Mile Tree schools, as well as using the art and music space, as classrooms. Teacher assignments would need to be adjusted, as well. The Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative (LPVEC) has verified that the transportation of all kindergarteners could be accomplished without incurring more cost.
Committee member Patrick Kiernan that he supports the change as long as paraprofessionals are utilized in the expanded instruction.
Ganem noted that any families who wanted to keep their children in remote-only learning would be able to do so.
Director of Finance and Operations Aaron Osborne told the committee that the pandemic has required money to be transferred around within the budget to fill out the technology line item and adjust staffing. Out-of-district (OOD) tuitions for special education programs currently have a cost of $241,309, but he said that will be covered by the state’s circuit breaker program, which provides partial reimbursement of special education costs.
The money the district received from federal coronavirus relief funding has nearly been exhausted. Osborne said $92,000 of the district’s $109,000 has been allocated for products and services, such as WiFi hotspots for students without internet access, health monitors to staff school isolation rooms, software licenses or subscriptions and sanitation supplies.
Osborne informed the committee that he had reached out to the town of Wilbraham, which has agreed to use approximately $120,000 of its coronavirus reimbursement funding to purchase additional supplies and services. He provided the town with a list of essentials, which include masks, sanitizers, HEPA filters, surgical gowns, laptops, gloves and wipes. The town of Hampden also agreed to use $30,000 of its coronavirus funding for the same purpose, in proportion to the town’s roughly 25 percent of the district’s enrollment.
The towns will procure the items on the list and the district will receive and distribute them to schools.
Osborne explained that the funds have a shelf life that expires on Dec. 30 and the towns would have been hard-pressed to use their entire allotments by then. Ganem thanked Hampden and Wilbraham for their generosity.
While Osborne expressed confidence that the needed supplies could be obtained, Committee member Bill Bontempi suggested they be purchased as soon as possible, as it was getting harder to come by certain safety materials as COVID-19 case numbers spike across the country and in many other nations. Osborne told him that he had overestimated the volume of needed supplies by about 50 percent. Ganem noted that the products are on an inventory system so they can be ordered as they are used.
Another ongoing expense for the district comes from teachers who are out on quarantine and the cost of substitute teachers.
Kiernan asked about whether the district will use the funds from the excess and deficiency (E&D) account, which contains all funds appropriated but not used in the previous fiscal year. Osbourne said that they may need to “dip into E&D,” as Kiernan put it, to make up shortfalls at the end of the year, but he said the funding from the towns brings them much closer to breaking even.
IT Director Bill Powers informed the school committee of the distribution plan for the order of Chromebooks that recently arrived. A survey was sent to parents. Those families who responded that they were without a device, that their device is their own rather than acquired through the school and that their school-provided device was not working, were prioritized the Chromebook distribution in that order.
The distribution will take place on Nov. 12, from 3 to 5 p.m., with each family receiving a pick-up time to limit crowds. Any families that are unable to pick up that day, will receive a timeslot to pick up between 2:30 and 4 p.m. on Nov. 13. Powers said the district plans to hand out between 500 and 550 Chromebooks over those two days.
Ganem reported that there have been 10 positive cases of COVID-19 among students and staff since the opening of schools on Sept. 16. He explained that the criteria for the district to switch to a fully-remote model include three consecutive weeks in which Wilbraham and/or Hampden have case numbers that put them in the state’s “red” high-risk category. At that point, Ganem said the decision would be made in conjunction with the towns’ health departments and the state Department of Public Health.
He later clarified that if virus transmission becomes a problem at one school, the district may choose to move that one building to completely remote learning. Contact tracing is a vital tool to discern the spread of positive cases.
“It’s a pretty delicate process,” Ganem said. “Please know that we look at each and every case.”
Committee Member Sean Kennedy told Ganem he would be more comfortable if the district had a firmer threshold of the number of positive cases for the switch to remote learning.
“It’s a fluid situation, Sean,” Ganem told him. He assured, “No one is taking [cases] lightly.”
HWRSD Health Coordinator Teri Brand, “We have to acknowledge that there has been an uptick,” in cases. “I think families, staff and students need to be thinking about our behavior outside of school because they impact in school.”
School Committee Chair Sherrill Caruana asked about the virus being spread through the district’s athletic programs. Brand said that there is no evidence of transmission between teammates, however, they were keeping an eye on the teammates of a positive individual as close contacts. In the meantime, the final two days of the fall sport athletic season had been postponed due to positive cases.
Kennedy, who is the committee’s representative to the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC), submitted 10 resolutions from the organization for a vote. Kiernan stated that he would be voting ‘no’ on all of the resolutions as he felt that the MASC had become political and that politics should be left out of education. Bontempi agreed.
The resolutions that the school committee passed demanded that the cost of state-mandated COVID-related expenses be fully reimbursed by the state; that K-12 education be funded through tax legislation; that control over revenue from school-related medicare remain with districts, rather than the municipality; that school committees have a voice on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) board and in support of legal action by the MASC to recognize sexual orientation and LGBTQ+ as a class protected from discrimination.