Topeka USD 501 to offer daily ‘micro school’ option for elementary students

Topeka Unified School District will enroll elementary school families who had opted into the district’s hybrid learning option into a new five-day-a-week “micro school” learning model, superintendent Tiffany Anderson told The Topeka Capital-Journal on Thursday morning.

Under the model, the district’s elementary school students will attend in-person classes five days a week in classrooms that will be limited to 15 students or fewer. That will help limit each student’s exposure to 15 people maximum, Anderson said.

Families will still have the option to enroll in both completely remote learning and the hybrid learning model as earlier presented, although Anderson said she expects most families will prefer the micro school model.

The district will also continue to follow its reopening timeline, with the first day of school, Sept. 9, online for all students and in-person activities being phased back in as pandemic conditions and county health orders allow.

Anderson said the district had been looking specifically at East Topeka, where she said the pandemic has taken a stronger toll than on other neighborhoods in the city. More of the district’s lower-income households are in East Topeka, and many of the parents there are also service workers who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Additionally, district staff members were concerned that continued remote and hybrid learning options could cause students who already face other issues to fall behind their peers.

“We know that prisons are built based around the literacy level around third or fourth grade, and the longer we wait to have our early learners back and engaged in an instructional environment like school in a rigorous way, the more likely we may contribute to an academic gap that we may not be able to rebound from,” Anderson said. “Particularly for the young learners who may have had exceptionality — free or reduced lunch students who may have had even less exposure to preschool and quality child care at the early levels.”

After looking at parent feedback, as well as the needs of students who might not have reliable access to internet, Anderson said, she and district staff began looking at the possibility of hosting micro classrooms at Quincy Elementary. Many of the school’s students come from the Topeka Rescue Mission, and Anderson said she worried those students wouldn’t have reliable access to internet for classwork.

The school’s staff eagerly bought into the plan, and district administrators later decided to expand the learning model to all elementary schools. The micro classroom model will also help teachers who might have their own children who would otherwise need child care during the school day. However, Anderson cautioned that COVID-19 spread could still force schools to send students home to quarantine, and she advised parents to keep backup child care plans.

To implement micro classrooms, Anderson said the district will have to use more of its certified support staff — people like instructional coaches with teaching licenses but who typically don’t teach students directly — as regular day-to-day teachers. In theory, the learning model requires more classrooms, but Anderson said schools will use spaces like gyms and libraries to serve as additional classrooms, with the added benefit that the larger spaces will allow for social distancing.

Although the district is referring to the learning model as micro classrooms, Anderson said the plan is more of a modified version of what a traditional micro classroom school would look like. She said the model is also an opportunity to look at what teaching and learning in smaller settings could look like not only in a pandemic but afterward.

The district will release additional information on micro schools and broader reopening plans later Thursday and at the board of education’s evening meeting, Anderson said.