Planning for new school year may mean earlier June dismissal for students

May 27  |  By Lisa Scagliotti

As the at-home school year winds down, teachers at Thatcher Brook Primary School and Crossett Brook Middle School have been packing up student belongings, art projects and work to send home using curbside pickup. Photo by Gordon Miller.

Update, June 5: Harwood Unified Union School District school board has announced that June 9th will be the last day of the academic year for students.

This unusual school year that dispersed students and teachers to learn and teach from their homes since March may be getting three days shorter for students in June. 

That’s what Harwood Unified Union School District Superintendent Brigid Nease told the School Board Wednesday night during a discussion of possibilities for how schools may need to adapt in the fall to resume in-person learning while remaining vigilant about public health concerns around the COVID-19 virus. 

Nease said that state Education Agency officials want districts to begin planning multiple scenarios for reopening before the summer break begins. “We’re being told to plan for a hybrid,” Nease said, referring to a combination of at-home and in-school learning. 

Schools across Vermont have been closed to in-person sessions since March 16 as part of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Gov. Phil Scott’s Stay Home, Stay Safe order included ending in-person instruction in schools for the remainder of the academic year. 

Thousands of students have been learning from home since then and in the Harwood district, June 12 was recently announced as the day students would be “dismissed.” 

But at Wednesday’s board meeting, Nease said the state has given school districts an option to use days added into their calendars to make up for snow days for staff to look ahead to map out possible plans for fall. She said she requested permission for the Harwood district to allocate the final three student days for that purpose. 

That would make the last day of school Tuesday, June 9, for students, giving teachers three non-student days to devote to fall planning. Teachers would still work through June 18 as scheduled, Nease said. 

The superintendent said that the administrative team is “working with our union partners” on the schedule change and that she would send word of the new plan out as soon as all of the details were certain. 

Waiting for guidance on fall opening

So far, the state has not issued specific guidelines for reopening schools although the federal Centers for Disease Control have put out a list of detailed recommendations, some of which may be particularly challenging to meet, Nease said. 

She said she is in touch with other superintendents and state education officials regularly to keep up with new information. So far, there is no clear advice on how to incorporate the federal guidelines into daily practice in Vermont. Nease said district leaders expect more detail from the state in early July. 

“The truth is we don’t know,” Nease said. “It’s highly unlikely school will open as we usually open school.” 

At this point, Nease said, school officials are reading information as it comes out and brainstorming on ways to comply. She said they are discussing a whole gamut of scenarios such as limiting the number of students in a school at one time with staggered schedules.

One huge challenge: students riding buses. “If there’s a dealbreaker, it may be transportation,” Nease said.  

Federal recommendations say that children transported on buses sit one to a seat with an empty row between students. In that scenario, Nease said, a typical Harwood bus that carries 78 students, would transport 15-22 at a time. In between runs, buses would need to be disinfected, she added. 

“Buses would have to run all day,” she said. “I don’t think we would have enough drivers in the state of Vermont” for that plan to work. “I know it’s frustrating,” Nease told the board. “Stay tuned.”

Budget hearing draws no public comment 

The board held its required public hearing on the budget Wednesday before its regular meeting. It began with a presentation by district Finance and Operations Director Michelle Baker. The hearing, like the board’s recent regular meetings, was held via online video conference. No members of the public asked any questions related to the budget, nor did anyone from the public comment during the board’s meeting that followed at 7 p.m.

The board briefly discussed the upcoming re-vote on the school budget set for June 16 with voters being urged to request ballots from town clerks in advance in order to vote by mail. In-person voting will be held in the district’s six communities on June 16, but school and election officials being mindful of the COVID-19 virus would like to reduce contact as much as possible by using mailed-in ballots. 

Voters will consider a budget of $39,751,941 which is just $20,000 less than the budget that failed on Town Meeting Day. The new proposal, however, does not rely on closing one of the district’s two middle schools as the first budget did. It would have combined all of Harwood Middle School’s seventh and eighth graders along with Moretown fifth and sixth graders with the Waterbury-Duxbury students in grades 5-8 at Crossett Brook Middle School. 

The new budget leaves school configurations unchanged and instead arrives at practically the same bottom line through spending cuts.

In other business, the board voted to approve $5,000 retirement bonuses for two longtime administrators who are retiring at the end of this school year, Harwood Union High School Principal Lisa Atwood and Director of Student Support Services Donarae Dawson. 

The board then directed its policy committee to look into whether the board should have a policy on retirement compensation for non-union employees for the future. 

The School Board plans two more meetings, June 10 and 24, before its July break. Board Chair Catilin Hollister laid out several goals for the board before then: Nease’s job evaluation and decision on whether it would like to renew her contract in 2021; another is to update committee assignments so board members know what issues they will take up when they return in August.