Learning to pivot: How St. Regis Falls Central School is dealing with COVID-19
A small number of COVID-19 cases among students and teachers have pushed some schools to all-remote instruction for short or extended periods of...
Oct 13, 2020 — A small number of COVID-19 cases among students and teachers have pushed some schools to all-remote instruction for short or extended periods of time. And new, tighter state guidelines on how schools handle sick children could force more districts to close in-person classes.
St. Regis Falls Central School district in Franklin County started the school year all remote, then brought students to school, and now has shifted back to remote teaching.
Heartbeat of a town
St. Regis Falls Central School is the one school in a really small school district. Nestled in the northern Adirondacks, it teaches 280 pre K-12 students from five towns.
Donna Bailey, a former teacher and school board member, says everything revolves around the school.
"The school is the center of the town."
Superintendent Timothy Seymour says that like all New York state schools, St. Regis Falls closed this spring and adapted to remote learning on the fly. For him and other superintendents "it was a a period of great shock and great tension."
What Seymour wanted more than anything was to get back to a balanced, meaningful education for students, whether it was in-person or online.
Finding meaning and connection
Seymour says that education is about finding meaning, relevance and social connections for students. That was at the center of planning for this fall. Seymour and his team spent all summer coming up with plans for in-person, remote, or hybrid learning, designed to respond to how the pandemic played out. They called them “pivot points”.
Seymour says the school having the ability to determine their own future was key. Doing so creates consistency for staff and students. If the school doesn't have that he says "it really just becomes a matter of survival".
To achieve that consistency and have students and teachers in the building safely, the school had to make a lot of changes.
Changing everything because of COVID-19
But by the time the school got guidelines from the state, built a plan, and got community support, they were running out of time to get their building ready for students and teachers. That's why they decided to start the school year completely remote. They were one of the few schools around the North Country that did.
The school had to figure out staffing with social distancing rules. They needed to get PPE and cleaning supplies and train staff how to use it all. And they had to get their students connected. Many didn’t have internet access or computers at home.
That meant that September 8th, their first day of school, teachers and kids were in front of a computer. Seymour wanted to make sure that the students had everything they needed so their first day felt as normal as possible.
"I wanted every student to wake up in their home and already have every clear piece of material, every piece of technology."
The school gave younger students “go bags” with materials, worksheets and books. Older students got chromebooks delivered. For homes without reliable internet access, the school drops off virtual lessons and assignments on SD cards. Seymour says the school is prepared to do "whatever it takes" to provide reliable education to students.
Remote to in-person to hybrid to...remote
Two weeks after school started remotely, Seymour says they were prepared to go in person. They transitioned to five days a week, where students came in to learn with their teachers or join class via video conference in the building. Some students chose to stay fully remote.
According to Seymour, "it's hard to imagine what in person learning looks like until you see it". But he says that their students, even the younger ones, understand the new rules and have been quick to adapt to changes.
But the school found all in-person, every day of the week, a little too complicated, especially with cleaning and multiple forms of learning. So it went to a hybrid model — that is until last week, when the school was forced back to all-remote learning until at least October 13th, because of new state guidelines about “presumed positive cases” of COVID-19.
A "presumed positive" case is one that hasn't gotten test results back within 48 hours or been diagnosed with something else, but is still showing symptoms. For St. Regis Falls, it is hard to get COVID tests back in 48 hours.
This raises a lot of questions. Before the new guidelines, Seymour, says with the flu season coming, symptomatic staff and students could handicap the school. Now, it is difficult to imagine what the winter will look like.
For now, St. Regis Falls Central School is going to try to open again — and stay open. But COVID-19 might force them to keep pivoting.
