Georgetown Co. elementary students can return to classrooms soon. Here’s why.
Georgetown County elementary schools will send students back to the classroom four days a week beginning next month.
The Georgetown County school board voted unanimously Tuesday night to allow all nine elementary schools and the one intermediate school to open up their classrooms to in-person instruction four days a week starting Feb. 1.
School board members cited the lower incidence of coronavirus among children as a reason to put elementary school students back in classrooms.
There is no plan yet for middle and high school students to return to four days a week of in-person instruction, Georgetown County School District Superintendent Keith Price said after the meeting.
“We’re gonna watch to see how effective this is and how safe this is,” Price said.
Shortly before the meeting, Georgetown County schools extended fully remote learning for a second time due to COVID-19 cases spiking across South Carolina.
The school board decided Tuesday that South Carolina Department of Health and Control data, which show a high incidence level of coronavirus spread in every county in the state, would not be a factor in the decision to return to in-person classroom instruction.
According to the DHEC data, a high incidence rating indicates more than 200 new infections per 100,000 people in the last two weeks. Georgetown County has a positive test rate of almost 32%, according to DHEC data.
As of Wednesday, there were 50 active COVID-19 cases in Georgetown public schools, according to an online dashboard that provides coronavirus case data for the school district.
Public schools in neighboring Horry County continue to operate under a hybrid model, where students attend in-person classes two days a week.
School districts in neighboring Charleston and Berkeley Counties have returned students to in-person classes.
The hybrid-plus model will allow students four days of in-person instruction a week. On Wednesdays, students will receive asynchronous online instruction while schools will be closed for deep cleaning.
The district has begun purchasing and installing plexiglass barriers on students’ desks. Under this model, students will remain in the same cohort, or group of students, throughout the school day.
Teachers are concerned
While presenting the possible courses of action Tuesday night, Price said while parents and students can opt for fully remote instruction at any point, many teachers in the district don’t have that choice.
Price said it’s important to make a decision “not only for the best interest of our students, but also for all of our teachers, for all of our educators, for all of our staff, and all of those families that they go home to.
“Many people say that, ‘Well, if students don’t feel comfortable or families don’t feel comfortable they can go into virtual.’ But not all of our teachers who would like to teach virtually have the option to teach virtually.”
School board member Patti Hammel said during the meeting that she is “very concerned” about the academic progress of students in the district.
“Our students deserve a chance to go back to school,” Hammel said. “I don’t think what we’re doing right now is acceptable.”
Board member Randy Walker, who has COVID-19 and attended Tuesday’s board meeting on a video call, said it’s important that teachers get the COVID vaccine as soon as possible so school staff members can feel safe returning to in-person instruction.
“When we’re talking about getting our kids in school, we’re not worried about the staff who are sitting there scared to death because they’re contracting this stuff,” he said.
“I don’t think anybody in that room don’t want to see these kids back in school,” Walker said. “Please, people, call your legislators and tell them to move your educators up to the front row of this vaccine. Let’s get this thing done.”
Meeting students’ diverse needs
Concerned parents spoke up during the nearly hour-long public comments section of the meeting, urging the school board to return their children to face-to-face classroom instruction.
Julia Badgett addressed the school board with concerns for the “mental toll” that remote learning has taken on her daughter, a second-grader at Waccamaw Elementary School.
“One year ago, she was a loving, flexible, happy-go-lucky, go-with-the-flow child who loved school and excelled academically, socially and behaviorally,” Badgett said.
But since the beginning of the pandemic, Badgett said her daughter “struggles with anxiety, having empathy for others, often has trouble sleeping, and is bothered by small things that never would have fazed her before.”
“Worse than that, she is actually regressing in many areas academically, despite regular tutoring and extra support from the teacher,” she said. “Our school district is failing her. You are failing her.”
Karen Plautz, a special-education teacher at Andrews Elementary School, said she doesn’t know how the district can safely bring students to school four days a week.
All special-education students in the school district were given the option to return to four days of in-person classroom instruction beginning the first week of November.
Michael Caviris, executive director for special services for the Georgetown County School District, said giving students with disabilities or special needs the option of being in a classroom four days a week was a priority because they thrive with one-on-one instruction.
“Whereas a lot of other students could navigate through the use of technology, Zoom meetings, and all that, these (special needs) students had had some challenges in working with that type of technology,” Caviris said. “They’re the group of students that . . . would probably get the least amount of meaningful instruction in a different format.”
Plautz’s classroom size likely won’t change much in February, since special education students have had the option to be in classrooms four days a week since November. But she said she’s concerned about the volume of students that will return to the school next month.
“Whenever we (in special-education) switched to hybrid-plus, my class size doubled. With just regular hybrid, I was able to put two kids at a table. . . since November, I’ve got three to four kids at a table.”
Plautz believes she had COVID-19 in late October and had to quarantine. Upon returning to work, Plautz said she occasionally had to teach sitting down due to lasting effects from the virus.
“I had the weakness, the fatigue for probably, I would say two weeks after,” Plautz said.
