School officials take 2020 school year planning slow as coronavirus threat remains

Definite plans for the coming school year are still up in the air, but school districts have made themselves available to those who may have questions or concerns about how local campuses will adapt to coronavirus guidelines.

Many school districts across the Valley have been providing their students and their families with COVID-19 resources and support lines for questions that they may have.

For Scottsdale Unified School District, they have been offering support to their communities by informing families of their plans for social distancing practices in the future. On the support service page of their website, they also offer weekly updates on the virus for families and other miscellaneous updates.

Allyson Beckham, president of the Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board, has been working with the district to come up with plans for the coming year but no guidelines have been decided upon.

“We’re looking at what the CDC and Homeland Security [and] what they’re all recommending [and then] we’re going to be looking at all of those things and seeing what they cost,” Ms. Beckham said.

A lot of the solutions that they are considering now include measures such as warning tape to section off appropriate distancing and Plexiglass screens in areas that would host high contact risks. With the school year just barely over, Ms. Beckham says that any of these ideas are still up in the air.

“There’s a process there,” she said. “Will anybody know this week the answers to that? Most likely not because that’s probably just a little early.”

Despite the timeframe, other organizations like the Arizona Education Association are taking some anticipatory actions. In early May, they put together a task force to fulfill their vision of schools in the time of COVID-19.

This includes what kind of precautions they would want to be taken and how this will impact students and teachers.

In a statement from their press release, the association’s vice president and task force chair, Marisol Garcia stated, “Over the last month it has become clear that educators and schools are more than a place of direct instruction but are places of support and community for our students and families.”

The task force has specifically laid out how they plan to achieve their goals:

1. Use existing data and member stories to identify equity issues and systemic failures and other opportunities to remove barriers to a quality education.
2. Develop guidance for Arizona schools to move into a post-COVID-19 reality, ensuring optimal learning environments, healthy and safe students and staff, and build in institutional support for all members of the school community.
3. Develop specific expectations and best practices to be included in Closure Action Plans in the event school facilities are ordered closed by local or state declarations.

As an affiliate of the AEA, the Scottsdale Education Association has been following the COVID-19 protocol that they decided and worked on by the state’s Department of Education.

“There’s a strategic approach in place to looking at models and what we can do and what is going to be a good fit for us but it’s still in planning stages,” Becky Williams said. “So there are not any solidified recommendations that have been made to be put forth into policy yet.”

There is not much the association can do right now to provide a certain answer for how teachers and students will be impacted but they have been working to help provide as much as possible for them until they have more information.

As the president of the local association, Ms. Williams said that it has also been very emotional to navigate through this especially when the schools moved to remote learning. Spending increased time in front of computer screens as well as adjusting to the new learning format was a bit overwhelming, to begin with.

“I think [we were] just trying to get our bearings about ourselves and be OK, like emotionally, and then [start] working on reaching out to our colleagues,” said Ms. Williams.

Along with more time spent consumed with their screens, teachers found themselves working longer hours and developing better online learning models for their classrooms. According to Ms. Williams, it was both physically and mentally exhausting.

Part of their teacher outreach has been a survey that touches base with educators in Scottsdale to see how they are dealing with these changes. The survey provides the SEA with other information like how they can better accommodate these teachers’ potential future needs for the coming school year.

Educators like Ms. Williams have been working diligently despite these conditions to continue doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. As teachers, they have one common goal of continuing academic pursuits and providing a safe and healthy environment for all those involved.

“We really left the gate running to try and meet the needs of our students and that’s our largest concern is making sure that we’re meeting the needs of our students,” Ms. Williams said.

Editor’s Note: Caroline Yu is a student-journalist at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism serving in a paid internship role at Independent Newsmedia.