Considering a School Reentry Plan – Getting Back Better

As a candidate for the Winchester, MA, School Committee, I’ve received a number of inquiries from parents asking about my views on the safe return of children to full in-person learning, so I decided to write this post to share my thinking on the subject.

I am committed to safely bringing our students back towards full in-person learning as quickly as possible, while maintaining a remote learning option for those families who choose that model. Once elected, this will be my top priority.

As a parent of two young boys in our school system, I feel the tremendous frustration in our community, and across the nation, and understand that voters want to know whether a School Committee candidate thinks kids should be spaced 3 feet, 4 feet or 6 feet apart, how many days per week they should be in class, and how many hours per day.

My personal experience is well aligned with that of just about every other parent, teacher, and administrator I’ve spoken with: This past year has been rocky at best. While I am committed to getting our students safely back as quickly as possible, and will work diligently towards that goal, I think it is worthwhile to first provide some context on the role of the School Committee.

ROLE OF THE SCHOOL COMMITTEE

The school committee is a deliberative legislative body for our school district composed of members of our community who each bring a unique perspective to the issues that come before the committee. The committee does not work in isolation, but rather in collaboration with other committees in our town, the School Administration, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the Health Department, union representatives, parent groups and more.

The School Committee can provide input, ask questions, set policy, and ultimately approve a Return to School Plan, but it is the role of the School Administration to develop and implement the plan (in consultation with the Committee). For this reason, and to not set community expectations before having the opportunity to review the most current guidance and deliberate with the Committee, I want to characterize my thinking around a plan in terms of ideas and areas of inquest that I would pose to the Administration as I work with the Committee to approve a plan.

THE EXPERIENCE I BRING

I have lived in Winchester for over 15 years, have been a Town Meeting Member, and have participated in organizing parents to support educational priorities from our daycare days to the present. In my professional life, I have over 20 years of experience leading the state’s largest association of technology companies, bringing different stakeholder groups together – often direct competitors – around common shared interests. I understand how committees work and how to seek common ground. There are many commonalities between how the School Committee operates and how a board of directors operates.

As a member of our School Committee, I will bring my experiences from serving on the Executive Committee, and as Chair of the Fiscal Affairs and Administrative Policy Committee, of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. I am currently the Board Chair for a charitable Education Foundation, and member of the board of a robotic innovation center. Beyond this service, I have developed and currently lead an award-winning board training bootcamp for women, tech leaders of color and LGBTQIA+ tech leaders.

My learnings over the years will serve us well as the School Committee brings multiple stakeholders together to address our many challenges.

ELEMENTS OF A RETURN TO SCHOOL PLAN

Returning our kids successfully to full in-person learning is about more than desk spacing and setting specific dates. We need a comprehensive plan. What follows are elements of a plan and areas of inquiry that I will bring to the School Committee for deliberation as we charge the School Administration with developing a plan for Committee approval.

Develop a Shared Goal

Given the diversity of opinions in our town, the School Committee should work with the School Administration, informed by input from our teacher and parent communities, to develop a shared common goal that will meet the needs of our many constituencies.

Having spoken with many in our community, I would propose the following goal for consideration: to safely bring students back into school more consistently while maintaining a remote learning option for those families who choose that model.

Physical Safety

Once the Committee has approved a clear goal, the School Administration should take the lead in developing a roadmap/operational plan with gradual steps/phases towards an eventual return to full in-person learning (with an option for remote learning for those who choose it). The plan should address student spacing, testing, tracing, and other surveillance/quarantine measures to monitor and contain spread of the virus in our schools.

It should outline a timeline and sequencing for gradually phasing back students to full in-person instruction. We should put an emphasis on synchronous over asynchronous learning, moving towards no longer relying on asynchronous instruction and activities. There are many best practices to consider from other districts (e.g., start by phasing back the youngest kids; full return in the mornings and synchronous remote learning in the afternoons; among others).

We should convene a “Return to School” task force or advisory group comprised of teachers, administrators, mental health professionals and parents who can bring best practices and lessons learned (including from private school experiences) to our planning. Throughout the plan development process, we should be regularly communicating the options under consideration with the community and seeking stakeholder input to better align the plan and ensure greater transparency and community acceptance.

Social-Emotional & Behavioral Health

In addition to a safe physical return, the plan will need to address the wide range of social-emotional and behavioral health disparities resulting from isolation, unstructured learning, and other impacts of the pandemic. It should also address the transitioning of children and families, who left during the pandemic, back into the Winchester Public Schools as they are an integral part of our community.

The plan should include how we will gather data on a regular cadence from students, parents, and teachers to assess and track progress around academic learning loss, executive functioning, emotional well-being, and other factors. We should gather demographic data to enable the district to understand whether there are student impacts for certain segments of our community that can be addressed at the group level, saving time and resources from individual-level interventions.

Once areas of need are more clearly understood, the plan should include a process for developing interventions for mitigating student impacts and for monitoring progress over time. In developing the plan, administrators should consider a summer general education recovery program and outline expected program impacts and potential external funding sources. The plan should anticipate that, even with a summer program, significant support will be needed in the fall semester to help ensure that all our kids have made the transition and are on track for success.

The plan should also include working with WINPAC and others to evaluate special educational needs and identify additional resources related to supporting all of our students upon return.

Getting Back Better

Our return plan should not just seek to get back to where we were before the pandemic but should look at how we can get back to a better place when we return. Entrepreneurs thrive in times of crisis and change because these are the times of new challenges in search for new solutions thereby creating the greatest innovation potential. New problems bring new opportunities to innovate and bring new solutions to bear.

The experience this past year has been mixed. We have faced many challenges, tried many things, some outcomes were suboptimal at best, but some have found new ways of teaching and supporting student learning that work. We need to gather the best practices and lessons learned from the past year and consider how we might learn from them to improve learning outcomes going forward.

We should look at our new capabilities – we have provided students and teachers devices, access, and a year of experiential hands-on training on innovative new technologies and teaching methods. Our plan should include mechanisms for gathering student, parent, and teacher input, not just on what didn’t work, but also on what worked really well.

We should support instructional coaches in the classroom who can help share ideas and best practices. We should broaden teacher professional development to extend beyond training and include a forum for more collaboration and sharing of innovative approaches that work. In fact, we should take every opportunity to encourage a culture of innovation. One way we might do this is to develop a recognition program and seek to showcase the ten most innovative improvements (by individual teachers, teams, etc.) each year.

Maintaining our community’s leadership position in education is essential to providing our students the highest quality education and greatest opportunities for success in their lives. This can only occur if we embrace an innovative, flexible, supportive, cross-disciplinary, collaborative, modern approach to education in Winchester.

MANY OTHER ISSUES

While these are top priorities, it is also worth noting that the Committee has a number of other significant agenda items on its plate. We will be conducting a search for a new superintendent that can help us take our district forward after such a difficult year, tackling complex building projects at both Muraco and Lynch that are essential to maintaining our educational standards as well as property valuations, renegotiating union contracts, and about a hundred other urgent issues that will be before the committee in the coming year(s).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

To all the concerned parents, I hear you. I want our children to be safely back to a more normal and productive learning environment this fall. I will commit, working with all stakeholders through the structure of the School Committee as set out in our town charter, to make this happen. I am confident that committee members are aligned and that it will happen as soon as it can. No one wants any less.

In addition to getting physically back, we will also work to assess the impacts on our kids and get the supports in place such that every student is set up for success in the year and years ahead. Our kids are resilient and, with the right supports in place, they, and we (together), can manage the disruption of this year. If we do not help them get back on track, however, there is a strong likelihood of long-term detrimental impacts.

It is our responsibility as a School Committee and as a community to work together to ensure that we are doing all that we can to get all our kids back on track and give them the best opportunities for success. As your School Committee representative, this will absolute be a top priority for me.