Monday marks return to full-time, in-person learning for many Hartford students

For the first time since November, thousands of Hartford Public Schools students can once again attend in-person classes five days a week.

Fuller school buses and classrooms Monday signal one of the first returns to something like normal for more than 5,100 students in kindergarten through ninth grade who’d opted to come to school full time before a rising number of coronavirus cases forced a shift to a hybrid model in November.

Pre-K students were also impacted by the fall change and welcomed back this week.

With COVID-19 positivity rates and cases declining again in the city and county, and educators now eligible for vaccinations, the district hopes the students will be able to finish the year the way they started it — together, in person.

“We certainly have worked very hard, and I also want to thank you all for your contributions to helping keep not only your families but our community safe as well,” Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez said during a town hall meeting last week. “I know that it is a whole community effort.”

The superintendent added that her team is working on a plan to vaccinate as many staff as possible. The Weaver campus has been identified as a potential vaccination site for staff, and additional sites are being considered, she said.

More than 1,200 students in grades 10-12 are continuing in the same hybrid model that they began the school year in, spending two days a week in person and three online.

Wednesdays will be half days for the students returning to learning five days a week, according to the district.

Meanwhile, more than 9,600 students whose families have selected online-only learning will continue that way. The district is planning to survey those families soon as it plans a phased-in return of all fully remote students to in-person learning.

That transition will mark the beginning of a multiyear recovery from the learning loss and social and emotional hardships students have experienced during the pandemic.

District data has shown hybrid and remote learning simply don’t work for large numbers of students, particularly at schools serving mostly students from surrounding neighborhoods.

As of Jan. 22, more than 60% of students in those district schools were chronically absent, compared to about 30% of students attending Hartford magnets, which enroll heavily from the suburbs.

Regardless of what school they attend, students who live in the city missed an average of one in five days during the first semester, as the challenges of mostly virtual classes compounded the struggles of already-disadvantaged communities.

And on average, about 1,300 students are considered disconnected each week because they do not attend even a single day of school, according to the district.

To date, the school system has made 3,186 home visits to reach disengaged students, Torres-Rodriguez said during the town hall meeting last week.

West Hartford is also planning a return to daily in-person learning this spring, while East Hartford schools are still exploring the option.

Reported COVID-19 cases among Connecticut students and staff have dropped about 60% since their post-holiday peak in mid-January.

As of Feb. 19, 5.6% of Hartford’s in-person students and 10% of staff had tested positive for the coronavirus since the start of the school year, Torres-Rodriguez told families during the virtual town hall.

Districtwide, 1.5% of in-person students and 2.7% of district staff were in quarantine as of Feb. 19.

“I know quarantine not only impacts one student at a time, it sometimes impacts a group of students, an entire class, and the same thing goes for staff, so we want to be very vigilant about all of those numbers,” Torres-Rodriguez said.

From Feb. 18-24, the state reported 465 new COVID-19 cases among K-12 students. There were 158 new cases reported among students attending in-person classes five days a week, an 11% increase from the previous week. Cases among students attending a hybrid of online and in-person classes saw a 9% drop to 183 new cases, while online-only students saw a 3% decrease to 123 new cases.

The learning model of students who tested positive was unknown at the time of reporting. Among staff members, new cases decreased to 124 positive individuals, a drop of about 14%.

From Feb. 8-12, 56.3% of districts were operating primarily in a full in-person learning model, according to the state Department of Education. During that time period, 37.6% of districts were mostly using a mix of online and in-person education, while 6.1% of districts were mostly remote.

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.