CMS parents, teachers plead for consistency in decision on remote learning

For weeks, families and educators in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have watched as two top metrics of COVID-19 spread climbed and remained in the “red” zone. And during a nearly three-hour public comment session at Tuesday’s board meeting, parents and teachers told the board the district needed to stick to the thresholds it had set for itself and choose remote learning until there’s lower risk from the virus.

CMS planned to bring all students back to in-person learning rotations on Jan. 19. But hours before the board’s Tuesday meeting, Mecklenburg County Public Health Director Gibbie Harris issued a directive asking schools and businesses to shift all operations to remote platforms unless in-person activity was required. The CMS board will meet Thursday in an emergency meeting to reconsider its reopening plan.

CMS’s metrics dashboard has been closely watched each week — chief school performance officer Kathy Elling provides a public update on the numbers nearly every Monday. District officials have repeatedly emphasized the metrics are not binding and are meant to serve as a guideline.

District leaders have said that no one metric would trigger a particular decision about remote or in-person, but that explanation did not head off frustrations from parents who said they only opted into in-person learning because they believed the board would follow the thresholds it had publicly set.

Rachel Frazier, a CMS parent, said that based on the board’s metrics and other measures of the pandemic in Mecklenburg County, such as hospital capacity, it was time to stay in remote. Frazier said that if the district decides to go forward with in-person learning, families should have an opportunity to opt into full remote learning.

“CMS asked me along with all the other families in the district to trust the metric system that was designed to automatically tell us all when it is appropriate to be in school buildings and when it is necessary to be at home,” she said. “My family made a decision to choose which plan to enroll our child in based on this metric system.”

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Parents can change their child’s enrollment in virtual versus in-person by contacting their school principal, who will consider each request individually. CMS earlier conducted a district-wide survey on switching enrollments in the late November.

Other parents said they were confident in CMS’s safety measures, and that they would like to see in-person learning resume next week.

“Parents should be given the choice to send their kids to school if they think that is best,” Frank Cornely, a CMS parent, said.

Superintendent Earnest Winston said that while he was confident the school system was ready in its operations, the latest public health guidance indicated that the community was not ready to restart in-person learning.

The district’s metrics dashboard, which outlines three color-coded zones for how ready CMS is to pursue in-person instruction, said the board would consider remote learning for all schools when either the case rate or the positivity rate had been in the red for more than 14 days.

CMS’s cutoff for “substantial spread” is a new case rate of over 100 per 100,000 people in a seven day period, and a test positivity rate of more than 10%. The district’s dashboard show both those metrics have been in the “red,” meaning substantial spread, since Dec. 4.

Teachers and parents called on the board to consider switching to remote learning in the fall once the case rate reached the red zone and stayed there. But the board did not vote to delay the expansion of in-person learning until late November, when a shortage of bus drivers caused operational problems with bringing middle school students back.

It was not until December, when both metrics were in red, that the board voted to return to remote learning due to the metrics it had set out in the beginning of the year.

“We’re in red today on both metrics,” board member Carol Sawyer said at the time of the December vote. “Even if that’s an arbitrary mark, we’ve crossed it. I think our community expects if we’re going to create that kind of dashboard it should have some meaning. Why would we even monitor health metrics if they didn’t matter?”

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Need for consistency

Charlotte private schools immediately suspended in-person learning on Wednesday to consider how to act on the directive, which does not carry the weight of an executive order.

Harris said Wednesday that students and teachers were at greater risk for exposure, even if schools are not a main driver of COVID-19 transmission, because of how prevalent the virus is in the community. She said she told CMS administrators Monday that in-person learning should be discouraged given the state of the pandemic.

Harris said that the timing of her directive did not have any connection to the board meeting scheduled for Tuesday, and that the death of a 22-year-old from COVID-19 created greater urgency for her decision.

“Any gathering of individuals in our community right now puts people at risk,” Harris said. “That involves schools, restaurants, bars — even places of work (and) places of worship.

While many of the public speakers who advocated for staying remote cited health concerns, some also implored the board to follow the metrics so they could provide better consistency for their students.

Samantha Zapata, a CMS teacher, said the district needed to outline a path forward or risk further dividing the community.

“I’m not here to advocate for reopening or closures of school,” she said. “I am here to plead with you to draw benchmarks and have a clear and identifiable path through this crisis. The lack thereof is literally tearing us apart. Perhaps we can agree a to a positivity metric like New York or Chicago. Maybe it can be based off the metrics dashboard created and discussed weekly. Without coming up with clear principles you will tear apart this district with the growing animosity.”

Hannah Bultman, another CMS teacher, said her students were struggling with the constant changes and that she could not give them a good answer when they asked to stick to a schedule that had worked for them.

“My kids have been asking for some sort of consistency,” she said. “They have asked over and over if we can go back to the schedule we had for the first quarter and I told them we can’t do that because we’re operating in this day to day world.”