Northampton will be returning this fall. They will be using a hybrid system of online and in-person education.
Students will be broken out into two groups, groups A and B. Group A will attend classes on Mondays and Thursdays, group B on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Wednesday will be a professional development day for teachers and staff.
Northampton has a plan B in place in case the schools have to move back to Phase 2–if more cases of Covid-19 occur.
Parent surveys have gone out over the summer, and 44% stated interest in the online option.
The bus logistics are still in preparation. Parents are asked to respond to the school system by August 10 acknowledging if their children will be riding the buses this fall
Yolanda Rease says
Keep the kids at home!!!
Online zoom classes with full instructions from their teachers. Let the middle/highschool children change classes at home as if they were still in class.
The parents are going to send sick kids to school we will be compromising the other kids parents of the kids daycare providers the elderly.
This plan is not going to work. It is not feasible. How can you social distant on a school bus. There were not enough drivers in the past.
Online will be the best option as long as the teachers are there as well to hold the kids accountable for all work.
Imagine being 4,5,or 6 and you have to stay in your classroom all day. You can’t play with your friends. You have to be confined to one room for 8 hours. How productive do you think the kids will be??
I think this has to go back up for review.
IT IS NOT GOING TO WORK!!!!
Bobby Justis says
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because two million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multi-volume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
People naturally assume that the public school system is trying to do what’s best of the children. The fact of the matter is that these institutions have nothing to do with education. They are set up by people who, like all other people, have their own personal agendas. The public school’s true purpose is to put certain messages into the children’s heads so they’ll be more obedient of the government when they get older.
Consider the ‘grade’ system. You start off in first grade, where you’re placed not by academic ability, nor by willingness to learn, but by age. The reason for this is very simple. Most children already think of adults as if they’re their superiors, and now they’ll associate their position in the grade system with superiority. Obviously, that’s nonsense. A kid in the 5th grade may very well have less overall academic ability then a kid in the 2nd grade. Moreover, education isn’t something that can be ranked. The kind of education that tends to be more valuable later on in life is your specialization, not the sheer quantity of raw general knowledge.
Next, consider the way a classroom is structured. The teacher is in charge. The students are to listen to the teacher. This is most peculiar as well. After all, the teacher is a hired employee, who is in fact working for the students. If anything, the teacher should be listening to the concerns of the students, not the other way around. The reason the classroom setting is set up in this way is clear. The students learn at an early age to respect authority figures, so later on, they obey the government.
Pam W. says
I personally don’t see the need to risk everyone’s health for 2 days a week in school. Further, based on the current plan of 2 groups, Group B is screwed. You will have Group A coming in on Monday after the school was cleaned on Friday. They will come in again on Thursday after the school was cleaned on Wednesday. Group B will be coming in on Tuesday and Friday, right behind Group A and nothing cleaned! If you have to have school 2 days a week, please consider having 2 consecutive days of classroom attendance. I agree with Yolanda. Teachers are stretched to the max everyday trying to teach and get their required paperwork done. Now you want them to also make sure kids are social distancing. I dare say the younger students even know what that is. I understand that everyone is doing the best they can but risking the health of everyone isn’t worth sending the kids 2 days a week.
Allen says
Teachers must stop be exposed to all the students. Who or what will protect them? Families will get sick and children and staff will be killed.
Could this be considered 2nd degree murder?