Dear Board Members:

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant debate about how public schools will operate in the 2020 to 2021 school year. At present, parents, students, educators and policy-makers are struggling with three options that have presented:

• 100% in-school learning
• A hybrid of part-time in school and part-time online, and
• 100% online.

However, these three options are extremely limited, lack a plan or structure to support them and are more about solving to what has been in place instead of actually solving to the problems that exists.

Not only are there more than three options for how schools could be reopened in the Fall, none of the options presented address the three core problems in a sufficient way:

• Provide a process for students to make-up the academic ground lost in the Spring of 2020.
• Meet on-going student academic needs and allow students to excel.
• Adequately address parent, teacher and staff concerns about safety due to the virus.

Significant Problems with the Three Options

1) Mass concentration of students, teachers and staff

As COVID-19 continues to ravage our country, we have learned one significant lesson: the more we allow mass groups of people to interact for prolonged periods of time, the more we spread the virus.

In fairness to the Loudoun County School Board's pre-selected options, we can't realistically have large concentrations of people in existing school buildings.

Even despite the best precautions taken, if you have three (3) to five (5) cases of COVID-19 among students, faculty, staff or other adults, you will not be able to track with certainty who had contact with who. The ending result will be a mass notification to all parents of a school and a school closure will likely occur.

The ONLY solution that makes sense for in-person learning to occur is to break up large schools into smaller pockets and distribute those students to other locations to keep the overall population and class size smaller.

2) Testing of temperatures

It is logistically unmanageable to test all students, faculty, staff and visiting adults upon entry each day. The process would take between 45 minutes to 60 minutes to start each day (accounting for late arrivals, organization and recording of results). Despite polling people on their "comfort" for temperature taking, there has been no announced plan for who would take temperature and how those results would be recorded (or if they would be recorded).

3) Mass transportation

LCPS operates and maintains a fleet of 800 school buses that transport 76,000 students (LCPS website). The maximum average headcount per bus run is 52 (Loudoun Times, September 2017) and the minimal number of runs per day is 350. However, to follow social distancing guidelines, transportation to and from one school location will require bus runs to increase. They could double the daily amount of runs or be higher. Students will be left outside to wait if a bus reaches capacity - delaying school arrival by at least 30 minutes, likely more.

Some parents will opt to provide direct transportation, however the exact number has not been determined. Regardless, the greater influx of parents conducting school drop-offs to one location will significantly increase congestion at the school - delaying student arrival.

These three factors ALONE all delay the start of a school day by 1 to 2 hours.

The ONLY reasonable option to ensure in-school / in-person learning is to break up the school population and distribute it in the surrounding community.

4) Hybrid model or 100% online learning

Requiring students to learn from home is the most untenable option available unless a student is immune compromised, has a parent in a high-risk category or there is a strong parental objection.

Previous delivery of online learning was a failure.

Without additional staffing and support, teacher hours become over-extended which significantly increasing mental and physical drain that lead to burn-out.

Students lose project-based work (learning by doing) which is more effective for building divergent thinking.

Screen-time increases strain on eye-sight and thinking, and the amount of knowledge and skill development decreases compared to in-person learning.

In short, the Hybrid Model is a recipe for academic regression, not success, and will lead to mental and physical problems for both teachers and students.

Online learning or distance learning is a great supplemental resource. However, it is not an adequate alternative for learning for students of ANY age.

5) Technology gaps, housing gaps and supervision gaps negatively impact learning equity

Not every household or family has the ability - due to income, lack of technology or lack of housing, etc – to support online learning. What’s more, there are too many households where parents cannot be home to supervise children every day.