All-Day In-Person Instruction To Launch In April In District 113

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — Thanks to school safety guidelines issued last week by state public health and education officials, students are set to have the option for full-day instruction at Deerfield and Highland Park high schools.

An online portal open Wednesday through Friday allows parents and guardians of students in Township High School District 113 to select in-person or remote instruction. Those that do not make a choice will be automatically assigned to in-person learning.

Superintendent Bruce Law said the revised guidance released March 9 by the Illinois State Board of Election and the Illinois Department of Public Health — the first joint guidance for school districts from the Pritzker administration since July 2020 — changes the default expectation from e-learning to in-person instruction.

"The state board is starting to put some conditions on students who want to continue to learn remotely, medical conditions for example, so either the student has a medical condition or there's a medical condition at home, or there could be other family reasons," Law told board members Monday at a special meeting. "But it no longer is the case that students can just learn remotely if they feel like it, at least according to the Illinois State Board of Education. They're really starting to switch and put the emphasis on in-person learning."

For the first time since the coronavirus outbreak in Illinois shuttered school buildings a year ago this week, students will need to provide a justification for choosing entirely remote learning. In District 113, instead of having to opt in to hybrid learning, families will have to opt into remote.

Two board members, Dan Struck and Mike Perlman, suggested sticking with the current hybrid learning schedule, which sees students on campus for two days a week. But the rest of the board disagreed.

"I thought the whole point to going to this was: let's get the kids in full day every day now that we can," Board President Jodi Shapira said.

Law said the consensus of the board has been to maximize the in-person instruction for students, so with the release of the new state guidance — which cuts down minimum social distance between masked students to 3 feet — administrators set about presenting an option for bringing students safely as soon as possible.

"It's predicated on this idea that being around each other and being with teachers is really, really important," Law said. "If we can do that to a greater extent, we thought that that was worth pursuing."

Under the District 113 plan, most classrooms will be able to accommodate 24 students while keeping 5 feet of social distance. Six feet of spacing remains the minimum around unvaccinated teachers or while eating, according to the new guidelines.

RELATED: District 113 COVID-19 Cases Contracted Outside School, Officials Say

For the fourth quarter, students who select in-person instruction will be expected to be on campus unless they are in quarantine or isolation, the superintendent said. Otherwise, they will be marked as absent if they do not attend class in person, and they will not be allowed to take tests from home.

"You can't come and go anymore. This is a commitment to be in person," Law explained. "Students who need to be remote, of course, will still be able to do that."

Those selecting in-person learning must commit to either leaving campus for lunch or remaining at school to allow the administration to create seat assignments and ensure adequate social distancing and contact tracing. Parental consent will be required to allow students to come and go.

Board members eventually settled on allowing some students to leave after principals of both high schools explained it would be highly disruptive to operations to figure out a way to arrange for all students to eat on campus.

A suggestion to limit off-campus lunches to upperclassmen was rejected and an option with no lunch break at all was determined to be untenable. A closed campus option would have delayed the start of full-day in-person learning, administrators said.

"Just seems like we're kind of micromanaging this, when we've got the principals saying, 'This is what we want,' Let's let them solve for the problems as they come," Board member Lizzy Garlovsky said at the March 15 meeting. "We all have a lot of great ideas and can definitely relate them to our own experiences with our own kids, but I think we need to recognize that our job here as board members is to take the recommendations from the administrators."

The first update to the district's COVID-19 dashboard is scheduled for Monday, and the transition date will be announced at the March 29 board.

Administrators also plan to offer an additional opportunity for saliva testing on April 2, a non-attendance day, aimed at students who did not consistently wear face coverings and socially distance during spring break.