Charter Schools Ready Hybrid Reopening

Common Ground High School, Booker T. Washington Academy and the five New Haven schools in the Achievement First network have all committed to a hybrid of in-person and virtual classes this fall as the Covid-19 pandemic continues.

Achievement First is waiting a couple of weeks to resume in person, while Common Ground is offering concerned teachers a no-medical-permissions-necessary option of teaching from home.

“I do believe we ought to be calling students in during the few opportunities we have to call them in this year,” said Common Ground Board of Directors member Errol Saunders. ​“If there is ever a time to call kids back and make them feel loved in person, this is the time.”

The charter schools have all given parents time to prepare for a clear hybrid plan while New Haven Public Schools have continued debating reopening plans up until the final two weeks.

Each charter organization has taken a different approach to questions like whether staff can opt out of in-person teaching and how many face masks to offer students. The differences both highlight the uncertainty created by the novel coronavirus and offer opportunities to see which strategies work best in New Haven’s diversity of school types.

Common Ground Teachers Win Opt-In Option

Common Ground board members were nearly united in their decision to restart in-person classes at the environment-focused charter school. Teachers, on the other hand, were passionately opposed to the idea.

The groups have reached some level of compromise: teachers can now opt into in-person classes.

Sunday, Aug. 16 was the second of two emergency meetings held by Common Ground’s Board of Directors. The stakes were high in what has become a familiar debate as schools nationwide focus on whether and how to reopen this fall.

“Are we prepared to handle a loss of student, teacher, parent or other family member?” asked the teacher representative on the Board of Directors, Brian Springsteen. ​“Board members will have to live with the decision. Teachers and students will have to live the decision.”

Springsteen and 17 other Common Ground teachers — 60 percent of the classroom teachers listed on the school’s website — asked the board to align its plan with New Haven Public Schools’ plan. They argued that like NHPS, the school should apply for a waiver to the state to start the year with 10 weeks of remote-only classes.

In written statements, they fleshed out their reasons. They worried about the specifics of how the hybrid plan would be implemented safely, from students riding city buses to needing more staff. And they made the argument that a majority non-white student and family population faces statistically higher risks from exposure to Covid-19.

“I am not entirely comfortable with being the ​‘model’ school for how this hybrid model could work, even at a unique site like Common Ground,” wrote social studies teacher A’Lexus Williams.

“It is not the fault of the school, the school board, the staff, the families, the students, that we are being put in the place to make impossible decisions with little support or guidance from our state or federal government,” wrote biology teacher Sierra Dennehy.

In the end, all 13 board members except Springsteen voted to bring their students part-time onto Common Ground’s West Rock campus.

Unlike the NHPS Board of Education, where the Black board members all voted for a period of distance-only learning, those leading the push against that idea at Common Ground are African American.

“I don’t like weaponized language when it is for other peoples’ greater good, not for the good of Black and brown communities,” said board member Babz Rawls Ivy. ​“Stop insulting us, as though we don’t care about our health. No one cares more about Black health than Black people.”

Two-thirds of Common Ground families said that they would send their child to in-person classes, according to a survey that was live until the Sunday meeting.

(Rawls Ivy edits the Inner-City News and hosts a daily two-hour program, ​“LoveBabz Love Talk,” on WNHH FM.)

The board members said that they are comfortable with the safety of the plan, call the need to educate students in-person too urgent to wait and argued that their role is to support their executive director, Monica Maccera-Filppu.

Common Ground has an advantage among New Haven schools. It already holds some classes outdoors, where the coronavirus spreads less easily between people. The school plans to hold classes in the six classrooms that passed ventilation tests with the highest marks. There will be one outdoor space, complete with a projector, for each of the six classrooms, according to school spokesman and lead teacher Joel Tolman.

Teachers will move between classrooms, while students stay put in their designated cohorts of 15 students or less. Their electives will all be online.

These strategies of small cohorts and separate spaces worked for Common Ground this summer. A total of 121 students came and went on the campus through Common Ground’s summer camp, summer school and green jobs program. The 84 campers spent six weeks together on the campus, grouped into independent cohorts that did not interact.

There were no Covid-19 cases this summer, Tolman said.

At the same time that board members voted against teachers’ wishes, they asked Maccera-Filppu to look for compromises with the teachers that could bring the small organization back into one camp.

Prior to the vote, Maccera-Filppu had made changes like reducing the number of days students would be on-campus and offering teachers the chance to opt out of classes. Springsteen argued during the meeting that this was still tricky for the teachers, who are not unionized and are not sure of consequences if they decide to opt out.

Immediately after the meeting, Maccera-Filppu implemented Springsteen’s idea. She emailed teachers asking them to opt into in-person learning instead. The results are not yet out on how many teachers will opt in and how many substitutes the school may need.

Achievement First’s Successful Spring

Students at the five schools in the Achievement First network will start in-person classes later than students at Common Ground and Booker T. Washington, who can start in-person classes on the first day of school in September.

Instead, elementary and middle school students at Amistad Academy and Elm City College Prep and high school students at Achievement First Amistad High will transition into hybrid learning on Sept. 21.

When the Achievement First schools do start in-person classes, the classes will be prioritized for kindergarteners, first graders and second graders. These younger students have the hardest time with distance learning and schools’ function as childcare is more important for these grades, Achievement First spokesperson Amanda Pinto said.

The delay is partially because families have provided such positive feedback about distance learning, according to Pinto.

Pinto said that more than half of Achievement First’s families want to continue remote learning in the fall. This is similar to recent results of an New Haven Public Schools survey of their families.

What is different is the level of participation Achievement First’s New Haven schools achieved in the spring. Pinto said that on average, 94 percent of the network’s students logged in every day. Attendance was taken once a day, so attendance in classes may have been lower.

The results of a state survey of schools in May shows the Amistad and Elm City College Prep schools at 80 and 85 percent full participation, respectively. Even this lower number is much higher than NHPS’ survey response of 30 percent full participation.

Some of the difference may be different understandings of the survey questions.

Another difference is that many Achievement First families already had personal laptops or laptops from their charter schools when the pandemic hit New Haven. The network was able to fill in remaining gaps within two weeks after schools closed, Pinto said.

The nonprofit also connected families to internet providers who were offering free WiFi. When that did not work or was not available for families in their neighborhood, the nonprofit shipped them hotspots.

This eliminated a technology barrier that New Haven Public Schools students have continued to struggle with as the district works to provide laptops, tablets and internet in a way it never has before.

The Amistad and Elm City College Prep students also got live instruction over Zoom this spring. Families noticed how much better this experience was for students in the charter network and asked New Haven Public Schools to provide lessons with two-way videos.

At the time, the district was anxious about legal and privacy concerns. NHPS has now committed to offering live lessons on Google Meet.

Pinto said that students even had lunch together over Zoom. They had four to five classes a day, which could be between 50 and 90 minutes long on Zoom. Teachers and principals worked to make the experience fun, conducting science experiments as a group, delivering announcements with puppets and more.

“It’s that kind of thing that makes a kid want to log on. With everything going on, it’s nice to have that constancy,” Pinto said.

Fundraising Ahead For Booker T. Washington

All three charters have moved beyond the resource issues that are tripping New Haven Public Schools up. All managed to reach a one-to-one student to technology ratio in the spring.

They are all providing masks to students as well. Achievement First is providing reusable, washable masks to students and teachers. Common Ground is talking about a similar ​“welcome back” care package. And Booker T. Washington will have 120,000 masks available for a total of 480 kindergarten through seventh graders.

“We’re going to have plenty. We would rather have more than we need to make sure that we stay safe,” said Booker T. Washington Executive Director John Taylor.

Booker T. Washington is planning to bring kindergarteners, English learners and students with autism and other special needs into the school four days a week this fall. Everyone else would be in cohorts, alternating time in school with remote classes.

Booker T. Washington also managed to engage most of their students, 70 percent, in learning consistently this spring.

“We were pleasantly surprised. It was a tremendous amount of work. We have incredibly committed teachers. I’ve never been prouder of staff,” Taylor said.

The charter schools say these successes are not necessarily because they have extra dollars lying around.

Charter schools get $11,250 per student from the state. Taylor said that Booker T. Washington usually spends around $13,500 per student, raising the difference from donors.

Booker T. Washington got around $305 per student from the coronavirus relief package for schools, the CARES Act’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSERF).

Taylor said that the school is currently digging into its reserves for a net loss he anticipates to be around $515,000.

“That’s the nature of schools during the time of Covid. We’re all lobbying for additional support. Charter schools are in the same boat as districts in that respect,” Taylor said.