Students participating in the hybrid attendance model at Crawfordsville Schools will return to full in-person instruction beginning Sept. 28.
The district’s school board approved the decision Thursday after calling for a special meeting amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, with members saying they did not come to the decision lightly.
“Every educational institution had to figure out where they were going to put that line,” Superintendent Dr. Scott Bowling said. “It is very split in the community, and it is all about — ‘Where do we draw the line between safety and education?’”
Crawfordsville middle and high schools students have been attending class every other day since the start of the 2020-21 school year. This hybrid model of attendance was adopted by Crawfordsville and the other two county school districts in July. Elementary level students have been attending in-person classes daily.
But as more is learned about COVID-19, districts throughout Indiana which chose hybrid models have been moving back to full in-person instruction, including Indianapolis Public Schools — the largest and most affected district in Indiana.
“We also have data out of Hendricks County,” Bowling said. “Hendricks County schools did a full return. They have four times the number of children as Montgomery County, and they haven’t had outbreaks.
“Metrics are the other thing we’ve been looking at — with the health department, North and South — not just this school board, not just me,” he continued. “The state has devised a color-coded system based on the number of new cases per 100,000 residents over a seven-day period. The other thing they look at is the positivity rate.”
The state calculates a score for each county based on these metrics, and county scores correspond to four colors on the interactive map — blue, yellow, orange and red.
In-person instruction at the secondary level is recommended for counties in blue and yellow and a hybrid schedule is only recommended if orange is applied.
“Montgomery County is currently blue, and we have been blue for a long time,” Bowling said. “We’ve never been higher than yellow.”
The group of school boards and the health department have also watched county positivity rates closely, Bowling said, excluding clusters discovered at Ben Hur and Bickford long-term care facilities, and Wabash College.
“If you exclude those clusters, we have roughly 365 cases, and of those only 17 are connected to our schools since school began Aug. 6. Also, none of those 17 cases are connected to each other,” Bowling explained. “When we talked to the health department, they’re saying these 17 kids caught it at home from a family member — not from school.”
Academics have also suffered greatly for students in grades 6-12, but not at the elementary level, which has been at full capacity since Aug. 6.
At Crawfordsville Middle School, 354 students had at least one “F” letter grade at midterms out of 596 students. At the high school, 297 of 686 students had an “F.”
“Those numbers are four times higher than what we saw last year during the first grading period,” Bowling said.
Dealing with in-person, hybrid, quarantine and full-distance students is becoming too much for teachers to handle, Bowling said. Many teachers report their peers are seeking alternate employment.
Other issues exacerbated by the hybrid model, Bowling said, are a lack of student participation at home, doubled and tripled workloads for teachers and staff, increased rates of depression and suicide among students, parent careers, difficulty navigating online platforms, childcare and abuse in the home.
“We have been having these conversations constantly,” board member Kathy Brown said. “This is something we have been agonizing about extensively, just like you have in your homes.”
Board member Kent Minnette, who spoke against the hybrid model at the board’s most recent public meeting, clarified his intentions.
“I fully trust Dr. (Scott) Douglas and our health department and the plan they’ve come up with for a safe return,” he said. “I have every confidence in the committees that we’ve formed and with the leadership of Dr. Douglas and the health department ... that we can do this safely.”
The decision was made in cooperation with North Montgomery and Southmont, and the MCHD has approved the re-entry plan adopted Thursday.
Families that chose full remote learning options will be able to continue doing so, and families opposed to full in-person instruction will have the option to switch to remote learning.
“Three things to go along with my recommendation: Mask wearing will be required all day, just like at the elementary schools; a full-distance option will still be available for students, and parents can choose to move to distance learning ... we will enable them to do that; and we would work on a one-on-one basis with teachers who feel especially vulnerable with a full return,” Bowling said.
Students will have one more week of the hybrid model before returning to school Sept. 28.
