Bellefontaine City Schools Board of Education members approved at a brief special meeting Wednesday evening the district’s reopening plan, including a blended learning model for the 2020-21 school year.
The student body will be divided in half and pupils attend school in-person two days a week and complete online coursework from home three days a week.
The following schedule has been set: Mondays are online days for all students; Tuesdays and Thursdays students with last names A through L attend in-person; and Wednesdays and Fridays, students with last names M through Z attend in-person. Blended families will use the last name of the oldest sibling.
District officials said this move was made after careful consideration of the number of pupils that could be safely accompanied at each of the school buildings with the current health guidelines, including 3 feet of space between desks and to reduce crowding in the hallways, before and after school and on buses.
“We are happy to have the plan finalized so that we can get ready for the students when they return next month,” Superintendent Brad Hall said Wednesday night. “There were many staff members and members of the administrative team involved in making these determinations and carefully working through this process.”
At the board’s Monday evening meeting when the plan was presented, Hall addressed parent questions and concerns regarding why the district was the only one in the county that would not have students in the classroom five days a week. He said BCS is the largest district in the county and after running the numbers and modeling classroom set ups, blended learning was the determined as the safest option.
“We want to remain open and it is in my opinion that not limiting the large number of students who could be in our buildings seriously jeopardizes our chance of remaining open,“ the superintendent said.
For example, at the high school, the usual 573 total students plus staff would be reduced to 286 students in blended learning. Those numbers for each of the other buildings are: middle school, 455 students but 227 in blended learning; intermediate school, 422 students but 211 for blended learning; and elementary school, 419 students, but 209 students in blended learning.
“As we peeled back the layers, we could see that 10 to 12 students in a classroom would be a much better compromise,” Bellefontaine Middle School Principal Lynda Holycross said Monday.
Also at the special meeting, the board approved the revised school year calendar, with the first semester adjusted to end after winter break now that the start of the school year has been pushed back to Sept. 8. Bus routes also were approved, which will be the same as last year.