Hamden Approves Revised School Reopening Plan

If all goes according to the district’s plans, Hamden schools will be open five days a week in the fall, with students rotating between in-person classes and distance learning.

That hybrid reopening plan was approved Tuesday evening.

On Friday, the district must send three plans to the state department of education: one for a full brick and mortar education, one for a hybrid model, and one for full distance learning.

Tuesday evening, after hearing an hours-long presentation on the district’s preferred plan — the hybrid model — the Board of Education approved those plans, setting the gears in motion to get kids back to school in a little over a month.

While the district is required to plan for full in-person instruction and full distance learning, administrators said they would fight to get the state to let the district pursue its hybrid plan. Surveys, administrators said, showed that if schools operate on a hybrid model, about 80 percent of parents would opt to send their kids back to school. If school followed a normal five-day-a-week model, with full days and full in-person classes, the survey showed, less than 50 percent would send their kids back to school. The hybrid model, they said, will get the most kids back, and will allow the district to do in-person instruction in a much safer way.

The plan the board passed Tuesday differs from a previous plan presented to the board. Originally, the administration had planned to have a four-day week for students, and would have brought all sixth graders to the Wintergreen School. After hearing feedback from parents and examining costs, the district came up with a 5‑day model that will keep all elementary schoolers at their home schools, while still using a schedule that allows for social distancing.

At the elementary level, each grade will come to school in person four days a week, and will do distance learning from home one day a week. On any given day, there will be either five or six grades in the building, with one or two doing their one day of distance learning.

In the example Assistant Superintendent Chris Melillo gave, on Monday, grades 1 – 6 will be in school, while kindergarteners will learn from home. On Tuesday, all grades except grades 1 and 2 would come to school, and first and second graders would learn from home. Wednesday, grades 3 and 4 would stay home, Thursday grade 5, and Friday grade 6. This is only an example, Melillo said, and the actual configuration could be different.

Right at School, which provides before- and after-school programming for the district, will provide wraparound services for 100 students per school on their off day, subsidized by the district, so parents can still go to work. Melillo said the district is still working out how it will determine who those 100 students are, and how much it will subsidize. He said it will likely involve a sliding scale based on free or reduced-price lunch status, but that the plans are not solidified yet.

School days will last five and a half hours. Each day students are in school, they will spend half the day in the classroom with their teacher, and the other half doing in-school distance learning to help minimize the number of students in a classroom at any given time. Halfway through the day, the two cohorts will switch, and the group that was in the classroom in the morning will do distance learning in the second part of the day. The in-school distance learning will be supervised by paraprofessionals.

The middle and high school will also have five-and-a-half-hour days, but students will come to school either two or three days a week, depending on the week. The student body will be split into two groups. Each group will come to school for two consecutive days, and then will do distance learning for the next two consecutive days. On a fifth day (maybe Friday or maybe Monday), the two groups will alternate week to week which one comes to school.

Special education will follow a different model, with more in-school instruction than for other students. Elementary school students who attend specialized classrooms called instructional intervention centers (IICs) will continue in-person instruction in their normal IIC classrooms. They will stay with an assigned adult to minimize contact that could help spread the virus.

Middle and high school students in special education classrooms will go to school four days a week, and will remain with their cohort. Middle and high school students who get some additional supports outside of the regular classroom will continue to get that specialized instruction.

Pre‑K students at the Alice Peck Early Learning Center will go to school four days a week, as they already do, in either the morning or the afternoon.

Theresa Ott, who is in charge of special education in the district, said she and other administrators are trying to figure out how to maintain classroom inclusion time for special education students. Special education students are supposed to spend time in regular education classrooms because interaction with peers is an important part of development. Ott said the district is looking at how to schedule that inclusion time, and how to do it in a controlled way, with a cohort, to minimize the risk of spreading Covid-19.

Ott also said that planning and placement team (PPT) meetings, in which parents meet with school staff to discuss their child’s individualized education program (IEP), will be held virtually. If parents don’t feel comfortable with the virtual format, she said the district would make accommodations, but that it would encourage virtual meetings.

Communication, Transportation, Safety

Chief Operating Officer Tom Ariola said the new plan makes transportation a bit easier than it would have been under previous iterations of the reopening plan. Bus routes will not have to change significantly because every student will be going to their home school. Even though not all students will be coming to school every day, he said the bus routes will be the same each day, with the same pickup and drop-off times.

The district is in conversations with First Student, which provides transportation for the district, about protocols on the buses. West Woods Principal Dan Levy, who has headed a committee on safety for the district as it plans reopening, said there will be seating plans on the buses to maintain social distancing, windows will be open as much as possible, and students will all have to wear masks. The district is looking into modifying how students arrive at school to make sure there are not too many people in one place. Levy said First Student is working on best practices for bus disinfection.

In school buildings, all students and staff will wear face masks. If a student is unable to wear one for medical or other reasons, the district will work with them to find some other face covering or other form of virus protection.

The district will provide personal protective equipment (PPE) for all of its students and staff. It will also do what it can to keep its buildings clean and virus-free.

Levy said water systems will all be flushed out before schools open, as will ventilation systems. The district will run HVAC systems more to keep fresh air in the building. It will increase the number of hand sanitizing stations in buildings, and will use no-touch appliances where possible. It will not allow any visitors at schools who are not essential to the school’s operation. 

Hallways and classrooms will have new layouts. Desks will be set six feet apart from each other.

Students will not eat in cafeterias. Instead, they will pick up bagged breakfasts and lunches and will bring them back to their classroom, or wherever they are doing in-school distance learning. The menu will be adjusted so that all meals can be bagged and picked up.

Superintendent Jody Goeler said the plan has to be flexible enough that the district could switch quickly to a full distance learning model, or to a fully in-person, five-day-a-week model. A part of preparing for that flexibility is streamlining the district’s communication systems.

Every class will use Google Classroom, said Director of Innovation, Technology, and Communications Karen Kaplan. That will help classes be flexible, both so that classes can be in-person and virtual at the same time, and so that the transition to full distance learning will be smoother.

Every high school student will get a laptop, which the state is providing to every Alliance district (Alliance districts are the state’s 33 lowest performing districts). Every K-8 student will get a Chromebook. Kaplan said the district would continue to make sure every student has some way of accessing the internet at home.

Unlike in the spring, the fall will feature live distance-learning instruction. Kaplan said the district had selected Zoom as its video teaching platform of choice because of its safety features. Teachers will be able to record classes so students can re-watch them later.

Watch the administration’s full presentation to the board here.

The district will send that plan, along with plans for full distance learning and full in-person instruction, to the state by Friday. Goeler said the district would fight to get the state to allow Hamden to follow through with its hybrid plan. If the state says Hamden has to do a fully in-person school year, he said, that will mean converting gyms and auditoriums into classroom spaces, and may mean losing a significant number of students.

“We’ll do that,” he said, “but we just don’t believe that’s the best opportunity for children to learn in this environment.”