'We Have No Choice': WI Family Grapples With Virtual School

OAK CREEK, WI — Every morning, Timm Nowak, 40, of Oak Creek, would wake up at 4 a.m. to shower, dress and gear up for his job as a plumber.

A typical day meant 10 hours of physical work digging trenches, wrenching pipes and refitting open sewer lines. Yet, by the time Nowak came home from work at 5 p.m. his biggest challenge was waiting for him.

That's when Nowak needed to transition from plumber to teacher. Nowak and his wife, Laurie Nowak, both work full-time jobs while raising their three children, Isabelle, 10, Cameron, 7, and Jayce, 6.

When the coronavirus pandemic forced the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District to shut down in-person classes on March 16, it left the Nowak family in a bind.

After cobbling together a child care plan that involved their parents and a number of sitters during the day, school for the three Nowak children began in the evening. They were issued three portable computers and a lesson plan administered through Seesaw.

"It was two, sometimes three hours of work every night. That's what we had to do at the time," Timm Nowak told Patch.

'The Fear Of God'

When the coronavirus pandemic hit in March, Nowak said local school and government leaders "put the fear of God" in them over the potential dangers they faced. The Nowak family committed to the work as best they could, he said, yet for two working professionals with multiple certifications, taking on a teaching role left them concerned about how well they could do the job.

"When my kids get stuck, I don't know what to do, and there was nobody available to help us through that," Nowak said of the spring semester. "I wish people understood. I'm not afraid to put the work in, but we need help, and we need the teachers involved."

Hedging Their Bets

This summer, the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District released a preliminary plan that involved students returning to school in person during the fall. District administrators hedged their bets, in a way, by coming up with a contingency plan that would trigger a transition to a hybrid or fully virtual model depending on the COVID-19 outbreak and public health statistics.

"Given the possibility that we could face intermittent closure of our sites or individual quarantines of our kids. If you can — and we realize may not be possible for everyone — we encourage families to consider tentative temporary plans in the event of intermittent school closures or quarantine," Superintendent Dan Unertl wrote on July 1 in a letter to families.

District Changes Course

Yet when the Oak Creek-Franklin Joint School District board finalized the fall reopening plan, the board voted to go back to school fully virtual. During the course of the meeting, officials cited COVID-19 statistics that showed a surge in cases in July, and a tapered-off number of cases into August that were well above spring case numbers.

Now the school year will start virtually on Sept. 1. District officials will review reopening criteria based on a COVID-19 scorecard that's updated weekly. The soonest face-to-face instruction could begin at Oak Creek-Franklin schools is Oct. 1.

Unertl said the board faced a difficult question. In late July, the district received COVID-19 data from the Medical College of Wisconsin Epidemiology Team, from the local public health officer.

"[On] Aug. 6, we received our first heat map, where Oak Creek was identified as a Milwaukee county hot spot for COVID. The Board reviewed all that information on Aug. 13 before voting and was faced with a very hard choice," Unertl told Patch.

"Parents have been through a lot since March; the Board, our administrative team — we talk to parents every day —it has not been easy for families," Unertl said.

'We Have No Choice'

"This is all going to fall on our shoulders, it's scary," Nowak said about the upcoming fall semester. "We learned at the last minute. Everybody who went to the meeting wanted them to open."

When the district sent out a family feedback survey this summer, they received 3,505 responses. The survey found 42 percent of all parents were willing to send their child back to school if they felt confident in enhanced safety protocols at schools. Another 31 percent of parents said they did not have strong concerns about sending their child back to school in fall.

The Nowak family was among those who felt there was a way to safely send children back to school.

Nowak said they researched several options for their children after learning the news. They explored sending their children to a different school via the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, yet that program is closed to new registrants until the first weekday in February, according to state documents. They explored paying for private school, but Nowak said they couldn't make the finances work out.

"We don't really have a choice but to suck it up until the next semester," he said.

This fall, it looks like more 10-hour days for Timm Nowak and piles of after-hours work for Laurie Nowak. In the midst of Wisconsin's COVID-19 pandemic, it leaves a family once again stretched to its limit, and a district handcuffed in its ability to help them.

"These years are the most important foundation of their education," Nowak said. "If they're going to fail because I can't teach, what happens next year when they go in, and they're way behind?"

This article originally appeared on the Oak Creek Patch