Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Sweet Home School District and teachers union leaders are facing off over classroom safety and other issues as opening day for the new school year approaches.
Union leaders maintain that “teachers working at home is the safest way to provide quality distance learning to our students at this time.”
They’re also concerned about the whether the district’s technology can handle the demands of online schooling and whether the real issue is trust, union President Elizabeth Hunt said.
Supt. Tom Yahraes and School Board members say they expect teachers and support staff to be in the classrooms Monday, Sept. 8, when school starts.
Teachers returned to school Monday, Aug. 31, for pre-school-year preparation (see accompanying story).
The Sweet Home Education Association in mid-August presented the district with a demand to bargain on elements of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is the contract approved by union members and the district trustees that outlines what is expected of the teaching staff and how they will be compensated by the district.
The School Board met Wednesday, Aug. 26, in a closed session to discuss the union’s demand to bargain on articles such as length and composition of the work day and work year, teachers’ rights and leaves of absence, Yahraes said.
More Preparation Time
Hunt said Monday that teachers are asking for more time for teachers and students to master the district’s new Canvas teaching/learning platform and that teachers be allowed to work from home if circumstances dictate that is better option for them.
“There’s a lot for us to be learning,” she said. “They’re not giving us a whole lot of time. The major thing is that we want the time to deliver the education our kids deserve and if it’s only a week, it’s hard to show kids we know what we’re doing with the new technology, especially since all the tools aren’t ready quite yet.”
In a memo to teachers dated Thursday, Aug, 27, Yahraes said the board has determined that the district should start the school year without changes to the CBA, “following all the state and federal laws and requirements by the (Oregon Education Department) and the (Oregon Health Authority) for distance and onsite learning, and that the district and the union “can arrive at reasonable accommodations” to address concerns about medical conditions and childcare.
Yahraes told a reporter that the district, since early August, has been training a “core” team of staff members from all grades in Canvas, who have prepared lessons to kick off the school year and who will train their colleagues.
“We have dedicated time for preparation already in our contract as well as each school has designed a Sept. 8-13 Canvas onboarding week, where we attempt to strike a balance of basic student orientation to Chromebook, Canvas, communication protocols, daily schedules, and basic lessons while giving teachers time to design lessons, using Canvas,” he said. “The classified and administrative staff can do many of these student onboarding activities Sept. 8-13, while the teaching staff can use this time to develop Canvas lessons.”
Home or Classroom for Teachers
In his memo, Yahraes said he “absolutely” agrees that the district must provide “quality distance learning,” but that “this is not best delivered from teachers’ homes.”
Hunt said the union believes teachers can do just as well teaching from home, if they prefer to.
She said some teachers, herself included, have children themselves, and it would be easier to manage their families if they could teach from home while their own children are unable to go to school. She acknowledged that the district will allow children occupy empty classrooms from which their parents are teaching, “but my 8-year-old twins are going to be in my classroom from 8 to 4. That’s going to be a much heavier lift than if I were at home and they were working on their schoolwork in one room and I was teaching from another.”
She said families spent last spring figuring out how to balance education with family life and those systems are in place for many.
Another concern about the mandate to be present in classrooms, Hunt said, is that when people are in a building, touching physical surfaces, the risk of transmission goes up, noting that teachers on the East Coast have caught the virus from each other after returning to work.
“We’re just trying to reduce the spread in our community,” she said. “Any opportunity not to be a vector of disease right now is a good thing. There are a lot of opportunities to spread it.”
Yahraes emphasized in his memo that when teaching students as distance education starts Sept. 8, teachers will be alone in 900-square-foot classrooms with independent HVAC systems and no students.
“Each room is stocked with sanitizers and is professionally cleaned,” he wrote. “In addition, all staff in the building must follow all social distance and face-covering protocols from OHA and ODE.”
Technological Challenges
Another issue, she said, is “unstable” wifi and computer service.
“Right now, the computer says we have an unstable internet connection,” she told a reporter, adding that teachers who have unreliable wifi capabilities at home could still opt to teach from school.
“Those of us who have weaker connections or don’t have adequate technology won’t be bogged down.”
Yahraes said the district has made “significant investments” in its technology platforms this summer and is continually upgrading.
“A technology issue as a trigger to go home is problematic,” he said, adding that he would expect staff to have “old-fashioned back-up plans” in place – “reading a book, doing a puzzle, researching a topic” – for such eventualities.
“In today’s world, every day, whether at home, school or in a business, there are technology glitches. We just need to be able to adapt and have patience and grace with each other.”
Yahraes acknowledged that the start of school may be challenging.
“No school district will have a perfect startup week,” he said Monday afternoon. “There will be a learning curve for all. We are in the business of learning.
“Will it be bumpy? Yes. But we’d rather work through the bumpiness, rather than kick the can down the road to the next week and thus lose more time to startup growing pains.”
He said he expects the community to be supportive.
“I know our students and parents are in this with us. It won’t be perfect, but delaying more, does just that: it delays teaching and learning more.”
District Efforts to Ready for New School Year
Yahraes noted that all district administrators contacted staff members in early August to discuss health and childcare concerns “and address any issues.”
He encouraged staff members with “new issues” to contact their supervisor so the district could address their concerns. He said Friday that, in accordance with state and federal law, accommodations will be made for those who need it.
Yahraes said Friday that he had received “19 or 20 form” emails from individuals among the district’s 129 teachers stating that they felt they should be allowed to stay home.
He said in his memo that he feels teachers need to be in the classroom.
“Our students, parents and community deserve our best,” Yahraes wrote. “If we aim to bring our students back to school (and we do), we must model and position ourselves to do this.”
He said Friday that he has received “a near-overwhelming” response from “dozens” of community members – “from parents and staff, regarding our stance.”
Hunt said she has heard from “about 50 or so” teachers “who are urging me to stand up for them.”
“If I didn’t have people worrying about this, I would not spend my time arguing about this.”
She said a concern for the teachers is that the district respect them. She acknowledged that some teachers are eager to get back into the classroom.
“I do represent a very diverse staff,” she said.
She said the district needs to trust its teaching staff.
District’s Goal: Back to School
Yahraes, who has made no secret of his eagerness to get local children into brick-and-mortar classrooms, said the district has done everything it can to prepare for in-person instruction, but has been prohibited from opening schools to kids by Linn County’s COVID numbers.
Two weeks ago, Linn County dropped out of eligibility for K-3 students to attend school in person.
With 45 new coronavirus cases reported the week of Aug. 17, the county had more than the 30 positive case limit per 100,000 people – or if the percentage of positive tests exceeded 7.5 percent, which triggered mandatory distance learning for kids of all ages. Older students are required to stay home until there are three consecutive weeks in which Linn County meets the metrics.
In a letter to parents, guardians and students on Aug. 18, Yahraes said the district would move to distance-learning-only status for the first six weeks of school.
But he said last week the district is poised to get students in school as soon as it gets a green light.
“We’ve met with the Linn County Health Department in early August, submitted our safety blueprints to ODE. The board has approved them. We have purchased 17,000 masks, we’re fully stocked with personal protective gear for staff and students who need it, and we’ve accelerated our learning platform to use in class so kids are safe, so they won’t be passing paper and other materials around as much.”
He noted Monday that the COVID numbers are improving (see right).
Modeling Optimism
Yahraes said he believes that “every organization has a personality” and it’s crucial for Sweet Home’s educators to “model for our kids that it’s going to be all right and we can get through this.”
If students aren’t seeing teachers in their classrooms as school kicks off, when the numbers line up and the district can open its classrooms to students, “it’s going to be a hard pivot if we start from home as educators and the metrics get right. That’s going to be a hard lift.”
Hunt said she believes teachers can convey stability to students just as well from other locations as their classrooms.
“I see it more being able to connect with kids if I’m at home because they are at home,” she said, adding that students may wonder “if it’s safer for teachers to be (in a classroom), why can’t I too?”
She said she’s concerned that there may be a lack of trust by district administrators in the teaching staff.
“Spring was an emergency scenario,” she said. “We didn’t know what we were doing and neither did the administration. We didn’t have specific guidelines. All these things were being made up as we went along.”
This fall, she said, things are much more organized, with systems and standards in place, which will ensure that teachers can perform as expected.
“I want us to come to a place of trust and respect first, and if people aren’t doing a good job, they can call us back,” she said, noting that the contract between the union and the district enables that to happen.
“I need my kids to get a good education and I need my teachers to work hard because that’s what we need to do,” she said. “Especially if they give us the tools to do it.”
Yahraes said Monday that educators occupying classrooms “is not a matter of trust.”
“We, collectively, cannot deliver our best distance learning to our students when teachers are working from home and not connected to each other and our resources,” he said, noting that he addressed that concern in his memo to teachers.
“From a management perspective, when there are, in some cases, one or two administrators at a school, it’s a lot more difficult to assess the consistency and quality of instruction and cohesiveness of teaching and learning and the possible needed feedback and support when teachers are at home, or some other distant place of work.
“And while I know union leadership has represented this matter as a lack of trust issue, I have had many teachers say thank you and that we need to hold each other accountable to ensure we all contribute to a great distance learning product for our kids.”
Readying to ‘Pivot’
In his memo, Yahraes said, “I want to be clear” that he and the School Board expect staff to be in classrooms as school starts.
“We cannot wait for normalcy,” he wrote. “It simply is not an option. Our kindergartners to senior are counting on us to show them that setbacks are opportunities; we can adapt; we can learn something new; we can take on the challenges and find ways to thrive.”
“We will start the school year with staff in our classrooms, working,” he said Friday.
“I absolutely understand some of the emails I’ve received, the apprehension. However, I think we need to be ready, as a workforce, to pivot. It begins with us – modeling and being ready to pivot to bring students back.”
He noted that “a lot of workers, locally, statewide, nationwide, they’re working. We need to be ready, as a workforce, to pivot. We have to become accustomed to working under COVID conditions in a safe way.
“As educators, we need to be ready, just like folks who are providing essential services – from our grocery stores to our clinics to our post offices, our police officers, the businesses in town.
“We’re open.”
Hunt said she’s “not trying to work against the district. I’m not trying to work against kids.”
“I just want to do what’s best,” she said. “I think that’s what we all want most.”