By Lea Kopke
Correspondent
DE PERE – The De Pere school board discussed the draft of its return-to-school plan and asked questions of an area doctor at its virtual meeting Monday, July 20.
Superintendent Ben Villarruel said the current plan only represents the best knowledge the district has gained in speaking with other school districts, the Brown County medical community and the knowledge it has today with the current outbreak of COVID-19 in the community.
“What we have proposed here could quickly, on the turn of a dime, become irrelevant,” Villarruel said. “It’s possible we’d have to significantly modify it or start over. This is just our best guess at the conditions that might exist Sept. 1.”
He asked the board to consider three main issues for its next meeting on Aug. 3: masking, blended learning environments and virtual learning for parents who wish to keep their students out of school.
“These three, as we recommend them in our report, are critical for us to be able to open school in a way that will be able to help in a small way to minimize the spread of the virus in school,” Villarruel said. “Without these three our recommendation would significantly change and our ability to educate students would come into question.”
Kathy Van Pay and Andy Bradford gave a summary of the return-to-school plan, which includes three scenarios: A, at school in-person learning; B, blended at school and online learning; and C, computer-based online learning.
In scenario B, students would be put into two cohorts placed by household, each meeting twice a week in-person.
The current plan, Bradford said, puts K-6 students in scenario A and 7-12 students in scenario B.
He said specifics of the plan, especially regarding operations, are still in development and will not be announced until August, so that the district has the time to best plan for the 2020-21 school year.
“I can tell you that that operations piece is very much in development,” Bradford said, “both from a district and a building level, to be able to begin looking closely at the operations and what day-to-day would look like in each of these scenarios.”
Pam Pirman, communications manager, presented results on a survey of all families in the district.
Pirman said the survey, which gathered more than 2,700 responses, showed an overwhelming preference for returning to in-person classes and more than 50 percent support for students wearing face masks.
She said the full report would be used by teams as they develop specific plans for the year.
Villarruel said the same material discussed in the school board meeting will be sent out to parents this week.
The plan was released by the district July 22 and will be voted on the board Aug. 3.
The board ended their session with a small presentation and questions and answers with Michael Landrum, an infectious disease doctor at Bellin Health and district parent.
Landrum said COVID-19 has to be treated differently than the flu because of its ability to be transferred by asymptomatic people.
He also discussed how the district can best prepare for the school year.
Though the district survey showed parents supported increased cleaning measures more than student masking, he said the true order of importance is the inverse.
“This virus is spread from person-to-person contact,” Landrum said. “Probably 99 percent of all cases are acquired that way, as opposed to touching some desktop or environmental surface. It’s much more important to prevent that person-to-person spread than it is to try to do extra cleaning.”
Public comments
To start off the meeting, two parents used the public comment period to speak about issues they had regarding students returning to school.
Matt Kornis, De Pere resident and father of a first-grader at Dickinson Elementary School, said he believed the district’s current masking plan is inadequate.
Though the mask requirements are yet to be decided for students, the initial return-to-school plan said it recommends masks for students in grades 3-12.
Kornis said he does not believe this will be enough because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend children ages two and up wear masks.
Chad Buboltz, De Pere resident and father of a son at De Pere High School, asked the board to make sure to give equal consideration to all extracurricular activities when choosing to bring them back.
Buboltz said he received a communication from Evan Marlowe, director of the high school band, indicating he made the decision not to bring the band back this summer.
But he said he’d also seen athletes practicing at the high school in the mornings.
“I ask that when considering how to bring our performing arts students back,” Buboltz said, “our band students, our link crew students and all those other students who are doing really important extracurricular work, that they all receive the same clear pathways to reentry.”