On Thursday night, the Northampton School Committee voted 8-2 to “transition to hybrid learning.” In doing so, the committee decided that children who cannot attend in person, either due to their own health or a family member’s, were expendable.
This choice was made clear by Superintendent John Provost throughout his presentation and the ensuing debate, in which he urged the committee to vote for hybrid while acknowledging such a vote would leave remote learners largely on their own.
The eight members who voted in favor of the hybrid plan openly decided that nearly all of the teaching resources should go to those willing to come in for two days a week of in-person learning, and those who are unable can collect any crumbs left over. This is a Faustian bargain that will have many consequences for families in our community, one that we didn’t need to make.
What did this bargain achieve? According to the sample elementary schedule in the hybrid plan passed by the School Committee this August, which was largely mirrored in Dr. Provost’s presentation Thursday night, students would receive two days of in-person instruction and three days of remote. In practice, this means that two groups of students would attend in person on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday, Friday; and they would have three days of largely asynchronous remote learning.
In effect, we would be trading four to five days of synchronous remote learning for two days of in-person. Dr. Provost justified this shift by placing enormous value on in-person learning, especially for younger learners. Two key points recurred in his comments: The first is that the human neurological system has not evolved enough to effectively use screens for education; and second, that early learners have developmental windows that can only be effectively leveraged by learning in person. I am not a neuroscientist, evolutionary biologist or child psychologist but believe the evidence for these claims may not be ironclad.
With an immunocompromised family member, sending our two elementary school children in person, even two days a week, is not a risk we can take. What we will be left with from the district is five days of largely asynchronous learning with whatever resources are left over.
Instead of three to four hours a day of instruction and interaction four days a week, our children will check in for attendance and complete self-directed work. The teacher and classmates they have grown connected to will be taken away, a cruel reality in a time when they have lost so much already. It will be difficult for our two 6-year-olds to accept that they can no longer have the virtual experience they’ve grown accustomed to, and that we cannot let them join their classmates in person.
How many educators, who overwhelmingly prefer virtual, will quit or take early retirement? We will invariably lose educators who cannot return for in-person learning. This damage to our district’s most important resource will last beyond the pandemic. As the district bargains with NASE, we are sure to see a continuation of the unfair and misplaced anger and vitriol that has been hurled at our unionized staff and educators. The teachers and staff have poured their heart and souls into learning how to do their jobs differently and are succeeding.
It is unfair to pull the rug out from under them at this point and ask them to yet again reinvent the wheel. It is similarly unfair to yank the remote-learning model built over the past six weeks out from under those who cannot attend in person. Alternatively, we should be enhancing our remote program and returning as many students on waitlists as possible to the classroom.
I sincerely hope the hybrid model provides some relief for children and families in our community, but please remember it is coming at a heavy, calculated cost. I urge anyone happy with remote learning to choose to continue when offered the choice in the weeks ahead. The larger the group that prefers this option, the more crumbs may be available to remote learners.
Michael Stein is a resident of Northampton.