Lake Forest High School Halts Hybrid Learning Due To Coronavirus

LAKE FOREST, IL — Classes at Lake Forest High School are set to be taught remotely until after the Thanksgiving holiday, at the earliest, as administrators announced an "adaptive pause" to in-person instruction.

Superintendent Mike Simeck's decision to shift to fully remote learning, starting Monday, followed his warning to members of the Lake Forest Community High School District 115 school board last week. Simeck said he feared the district was getting "closer and closer" to an COVID-19 outbreak.

In a message to families announcing the return to remote, the superintendent said teachers will still have the option of instructing from the school building, and extracurricular activities will continue during the pause.

"As the incidence rate of COVID-19 continues to accelerate throughout Lake County and in our own community, our schools are observing an uptick in the reporting of close contacts and a rise in the number of resulting quarantines," Simeck said Friday. "This is resulting in significant operational challenges related to running our school."

For the first time, the district has begun regularly reporting data about the total number of confirmed cases among students and staff and the number of people in quarantine. As of Monday morning, there have been 16 known cases among students and seven among staff — with two students newly diagnosed in the past week. There were also 126 students and 40 staffers in quarantine and temporarily not allowed in school buildings.

According to the Lake County Health Department, schools should shift to fully remote instruction whenever the per capita rate of new coronavirus cases reaches a rolling average of 15 new infections per day, per 100,000 people. The rate for Lake Forest and Lake Bluff's ZIP codes reached nearly 40 per 100,000 people last week. In Lake County as a whole, the incidence rate exceeded 68 new cases per 100,000.

Lake Forest High School's move to remote learning comes about four weeks after Lake County public health officials recommended all schools pause in-person instruction due to increasing community spread. The leadership of the board rejected the Lake County Health Department recommendation and remained open, prompting criticism from teacher's union representative Becca Schwartz.

"The board chose to ignore our administration and the professionals," Schwartz said. "Instead, they held a last-minute meeting and without discussing the topic in an open forum, our board president decided to keep the building open."

RELATED: Lake Forest High School Remains Open Despite Health Department Guidance

On Friday, Simeck also announced the formation of a COVID-19 metrics advisory council, which will be tasked with determining which objective measurements could be used to make future determinations about when it is safe to shift between remote, hybrid or fully in-person learning.

The metrics council is set to begin meeting this week and will eventually make a recommendation to the board, Simeck said. It includes experts in epidemiology, data analysis, COVID-19 testing and data, as well as parents, board members and representatives of the Lake Forest High School teacher's union and student council.

At the board's Nov. 9 meeting, representatives of the teacher's union issued what District 115 board vice president Sally Davis described as "a threat of litigation." According to the district, a federal mediator has been moderating negotiations between the union and administrators regarding working conditions during the pandemic.

RELATED: Lake Forest High School Considers Pausing Amid Coronavirus Surge

Principal Chala Holland said sports and other student activities would continue during the period of remote learning.

"During our Adaptive Pause, we will continue to support onsite extracurricular activities," Holland said Friday in a message to families. "Students participating onsite at LFHS should continue to complete the screener before arriving on campus and should follow all safety expectations and protocols. There will be a mixture of in-person and remote activities offered."

Holland said teachers and staff were working to incorporate feedback from surveys about remote learning, much of which concerned the use and feel of class time. There will be more time for independent learning away from the screen, breaks to get up and move around and more opportunities for one-on-one or small group instruction.

Simeck said plans for the week of Nov. 30 would be announced no later than Nov. 24, the Tuesday before the Thanksgiving holiday.