Fairview Park City School District creates Reimagine School Task Force to plan for uncertain 2020-2021 school year

Fairview Park High school and middle school sign

Fairview Park City Schools. (John Benson, special to cleveland.com)

FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio -- Uncertainty due to COVID-19 is the only certainty for educators and administrators heading into the 2020-2021 school year. Many districts are planning blended-learning contingencies, featuring instruction at buildings one or two days a week followed by remote learning.

Still, the logistics of how that will work remain unclear. That’s why Fairview Park City Schools Superintendent Bill Wagner created the Reimagine School Task Force, which had its second meeting earlier this week.

“This is a collection of staff members, PTA presidents, administrators and supportive parents looking to troubleshoot and brainstorm all of the different things we need to consider as we move forward,” Wagner said.

“Reviewing all of the current federal and state guidelines and recommendations from the Ohio Department of Health, the task force is looking to build over time basically the safest way for us to have students return to school," he said.

"That will likely be some combination of in-person and remote learning, especially at the upper level, but we have to wait and see how things unfold over the course of the summer.”

One such question is how will kids, who normally ride 60 to a school bus, not only be safely transported -- social distancing in mind -- to and from their schools, but also whether the fleet can accommodate additional routes due to half-empty buses.

“We’ll be juggling a lot of the same challenges everyone else has, including transportation, personal hygiene, cleanliness, cleaning processes and just keeping people apart,” Wagner said.

“The younger students are the ones who need to come back to school in order to open the economy and allow parents to be able to go to work. So we’re getting some creative thinking going on with our parents and teachers about how we might be able to accomplish that," Wagner said.

"We’re not there yet, and we’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve got a good head start.”

While some districts have ended school years early with the idea of providing teachers with professional development related to sharpening remote-teaching skills, the superintendent said the 2019-2020 school year will finish as planned June 11 for students and June 12 for teachers.

The last day for teachers will be spent planning for next year, with discussions recapping what curriculum milestones were achieved and which ones may need to be covered early next year as students move ahead.

While there’s still plenty of ambiguity related to what education will look like in the fall, Wagner said the way Fairview Park City Schools educators and administrators performed “admirably” this spring leads him to have absolute confidence going into next school year.

“We started off in a really fortunate place in that we’re a very technologically advanced school district with our students, families and teachers,” Wagner said. “We were poised and ready for that shift to remote learning.

"However, we know that teaching and learning is about people, and you really need to have the highest levels of personal interaction as we can to maximize our teaching.

“That’s why we pulled together this task force, so we can get the best thinking of all of the different demographics. We have time between now and when the school year starts to get this situated in such a way that’s the best program available for Fairview Park.”

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