North Shore schools prepare for reopening

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School districts in Nassau and Suffolk counties, along with rest of the state, will be allowed to reopen for in-person instruction, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Aug. 7. He said he based his decision on low Covid-19 infection rates recorded in every region.

“Everywhere in the state, every region is below the threshold that we established,” Cuomo said during a conference call with reporters. “If there’s a spike in the infection rate, if there’s a matter of concern in the infection rate, we can revisit.”

The State Education Department is leaving the specifics of how to reopen New York’s 749 school districts to the districts themselves. They are empowered to make decisions about what in-person learning will look like, how much remote learning will be offered and how to implement safety protocols. Masks will be mandated, and students will be required to have one with them at all times.

“We are giving flexibility to the school districts,” Cuomo said. Similar to the state’s phased-in economic reopening, he added, “There was no one-size-fits-all” approach then, nor is there now.

North Shore School District Superintendent Dr. Peter Giarrizzo said that the district is prepared to work with three different models: all remote, all in-person or a hybrid of the two. The district’s plan as of now, however, is to have all kindergartners through eighth-graders in school every day, while North Shore High School students, Giarrizzo explained, will be divided into two cohorts. One cohort will be in the building on Mondays and Wednesdays, while the other will be there Tuesdays and Thursdays. When they’re not in school, he said, the older students will work online on recorded lessons on a normal class schedule. They will all learn remotely on Fridays, in the interest of building a sense of community that would not be possible if they were always working separately.

Giarrizzo said that the high school students will be treated differently from those in other buildings because the school isn’t large enough for them to be socially distanced all the time. And, he said, their recorded lessons will be more like webinars than live-streams, because teachers will need to maximize the attention they give their students, rather than teaching and looking at a computer screen simultaneously.

Social distancing practices will be a key factor in the reopening of schools, Giarrizzo said. Elementary students will always been six feet apart, will wear masks at all times except when they are eating, and may have plastic barriers set up on their desks.

Additionally, he said, students will spend as much time in the same room as possible, with teachers moving from classroom to classroom rather than students. The district is also looking into directing students to use different points of entry to the school buildings, where their temperatures will be taken as they enter. Outdoor learning, which has been a success during summer school sessions, will also be a possibility, he said.

“The framework is in place, and it is strong,” Giarrizzo said. “We’ve got many, many details to work out between now and Sept. 8, and we will. What will guide every decision as we move forward is ensuring health, wellness, creativity [and] exciting, joyful learning that we’ve kind of lost, so we have to get back to that.”

Dave Ludmar, president of the North Shore Board of Education, said he was excited to see the progress the district has made in its preparations to open — both as a trustee and as the parent of two North Shore Middle School students, Louisa and Jacob, who, Ludmar said, are excited about getting back to school.

He added that he hoped to see the extra precautions being taken by the district become unnoticeable as part of a new normal.

Giarrizzo said the district would hold three virtual town halls in the next few weeks to field questions and concerns from community members. He said he viewed the return to school as an opportunity to elevate students’ learning, using what educators learned during the pandemic and combining that with standard in-person teaching methodology.

“I’m just really hopeful for how we leverage the learning that the pandemic has caused us to engage in to think about education and teaching in different ways,” the superintendent said, adding, “I see it as a massive opportunity for us to grow as an organization, and we shouldn’t squander it.”