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Date: 1/26/2021
WESTHAMPTON – With the uncertainty of the coronavirus, school committees find themselves constantly making changes to their learning models to ensure the safety of their students.
Hampshire Regional High School is currently in a hybrid learning model with three different cohorts, an A group, a B group, and then a remote population.
Hampshire Regional School Committee Chair Margaret Larson said, for example, their teachers teach group A in-person on Monday and Tuesday mornings and teach the remote cohort in the afternoon. While group A is at home, they complete their work for all their classes independently.
All students learn remotely on Wednesdays.
She shared that unlike most hybrid models, where the remote teams are either trying to Zoom in at the same time a teacher is teaching or the remote students are learning through a different company and not receiving the school curriculum, their choice is to make sure there is direct instruction of all of their students every single day.
By splitting the cohorts the way they have, teachers are generally seeing three to eight kids in a physical classroom, she explained.
"We have very good safety protocols that have been developed with our nursing staff and with the Westhampton Board of Health. Our students are following those protocols, our teachers are following those protocols so we are not seeing in-school transmission and that is the key determining factor for us,” Larson said.
She continued to say while the communities’ cases have gone up, they are not seeing any transmission rates within the schools, and even when there was a positive case in the school, there was no close contact identified because they are following the safety protocols.
“I would also say we very much appreciate the work that the teachers are doing because it is a lot of work and they are all really doing their best to give our students the best possible education under these circumstances,” she said.
At Westhampton Elementary School, because the preschoolers and kindergarteners have a smaller group, they are in-person on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday and half-day remote on Wednesday.
Students in grades fourth through sixth are still in a hybrid model and split between two cohorts. School Committee Chair Brigid O’Riordan said students in cohort A are in in-person learning on Monday and Tuesday and cohort B have in-person learning on Thursday and Friday. All students have a half-day remote learning day on Wednesday.
At the Jan. 20 Southampton Board of Health meeting, William E. Norris School Committee Chair Jon Lumbra said his committee would like to have a joint meeting to discuss rules and responsibilities and set expectations.
While no meeting was scheduled, Stephanie Fass, the lead nurse for the Hampshire Regional School District, and Board of Health member Kaitlin Rooks were assigned to work with the committee to improve communication.
On Jan. 21 the William E. Norris School Committee met and voted to return to its hybrid learning model on Jan 25.
Lumbra said preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders will return first. Grades 2-6 with remain in cohort cycle for one week. On the following Monday, grades 3-6 will begin their synchronous, simultaneous side-by-side learning. Second graders will still be in their cohorts until a teacher is hired to create another classroom.
Principal Aliza Pulta told Reminder Publishing they were in a hybrid model beginning in September 2020 up through most of December 2020.
“Just prior to Christmas, we went remote. We returned to hybrid on Jan 4, then went back to remote on Jan. 11 through Jan. 22,” she said.