One of the criticisms of the current hybrid instructional model being utilized by the Appleton Area School District is that the two days students receive of in-person instruction are not full school days but only 4 to 5 hours. The concern also is that, when the students return to 4 day a week instruction, that they will still just be going to school for 4 hours instead of a full, normal school day. During the 03/22/2021 Board of Education meeting, Ben Vogel, Assistant Superintendent at the High School level, was asked to respond to the concern that the planned 4 days of instruction would only be 4 hours of school per day.
I don’t have personal experience with any of the AASD schedules in general or of the AASD high school schedule specifically, and, because of that, I feel I lack the background to paraphrase his answer in a way that would be accurate or understandable. [To me, as an outsider, it comes across as if he is acknowledging that these criticisms are true and that the school days do have fewer instructional hours. But maybe that’s not what he was saying.] I transcribed his answer instead of trying to shorten and paraphrase it and am posting it here in the hopes that it is understandable to people who do have experience with the AASD high school schedule and that it answers some of their questions.
Ben Vogel: “Back in August we were tasked with putting together a schedule–to create a schedule that would work, that needed to be flexible, we need to be safe, and need to equitable, these are all things that we kept in mind. So when I think about what we put together, we decided that it made sense to have classes over two days because then we wouldn’t have kids switching every hour, eight times in a day. Instead we have four classes on Monday, four classes on Tuesday, limiting movement, adding time to each class period and–so when you think about seat time, and I think that’s what people are talking–yeah, if you look at the number of hours where a student it in a seat, it’s somewhere between 17 and 18 hours. That’s specifically seat time. That’s why when we created this flexible model we added in student support time, beginning and ending of every day, so that teachers would be able to support–remember when created this we were creating it first and foremost because we were going to move into a hybrid model to begin with. AA BB. So we needed to have a model where teachers would be able to support–simultaneously teach the students in front of them as well as the students who were at home. So when you think about at the beginning of the year we wanted to make sure that all students had a chance to keep the chance (this is August), to keep all the classes that they had already signed up for and this was a way for them to keep their schedule, but also for students who might be virtual and students who are in-person. So teachers are simultaneously teaching the A group, the B group, and then the C group which would be the students that are fully virtual. So we didn’t add anymore staff at the middle school or high school level. o every teacher–their case load or their student, their class size, is at an average of 29 or 30 students per class. So with that in mind, we had to create a system where the teacher would be able to support the students in the class as well as the students who were at home, and, at the same time, have kids distanced because we had six feet at the time, and make sure that kids would not be close contact one another if they were positive. And that’s why we have this major flexibility, so that students, if they weren’t in class, face-to-face, then they didn’t necessarily have to be in school because the last thing we want to do is for kids to be in close contact with somebody. And if you go back to August, that was the biggest issue. We needed to have a system in place where we wanted kids to be face-to-face, but we also provided opportunities for kids to learn from home. So, yeah, we put the heavy lift on our teachers, and that’s what Judy’s talking about. We still have 20-25% who are not comfortable being in school. And to just say–remember that high school’s unique because kids have a unique schedule. It’s not like elementary where kid’s for the most part might stay in one classroom. They’re switching classes every hour. So when we got together in August this is what we put together–very flexible opportunity for kids at home and kids face-to-face to receive an equitable education because we didn’t want kids at home not to be able to have an appropriate opportunity to learn, and that’s where–and I’ll just finish by saying this–when you think about seat time, you have so many hours where you’re with the teacher face-to-face and then you have those other hours, and I would call that more independent time or teacher-support time, where students are learning through Canvas modules and if they need help they have support whether you’re face-to-face student, hybrid student, or virtual student where you can meet with your teacher, whichever teachers you need to meet with, in the morning. At the beginning of the day there’s a 65 minute period. There’s a 65 minute period at the end of the day. And then there are three periods on Wednesday afternoon–so Wednesday afternoon, if you have that time up, that’s another 11.9 hours, and then we also created an advisory period each day because we knew the social/emotion piece. When you go back to August we knew, you know, we were talking at that time about kids being face-forward and just sitting in your class in your chair, but we knew that kids need to have a chance for advisory, to meet the social/emotional needs. So you have that, that’s another 2.5 hours per week. So if you add all that up then you get to where you would have had kids taking–the same as kids taking 45 minute classes however many periods a day, however many class they have. So we combined the–we’ve combined the seat time along with the student support times for that flexibility to try to meet the needs that we were trying to meet back in August, and also be able to switch back and forth because we knew it was going to switch from in-person or to fully virtual to hybrid to back and forth, and we didn’t want kids pinballing back and forth. So we needed to have a schedule in place that was flexible enough to meet those needs and also something the teachers could do, and it’s sustainable for the school year. So now we are where we are, and it’s awesome. We want kids to be in school; we’re gonna be back 4 days where we can see how this is gonna work. CDC just came in a couple days ago with the three feet vs six feet but we don’t know if that means close contact is still six feet. But that is why we created the system that we have. So, you know, you think of E-School which would have been–if we didn’t–if kids wanted to be fully virtually they did have an E-School option, and we’ve had a few more kids take that option, but when you think about E-School, kid’s don’t have any seat time. There are zero hours of seat time instruction. So when we thought about what we wanted to create to meet the needs of this unique situation, we wanted something in between–we wanted the seat time but we also didn’t want that to impact the kids who were going to remain fully virtual. And this is the system we came up with. So being able to use the Canvas system has been very impactful and a really good thing because that’s the learning management system that we’ve used for this whole year. So, again, lots of words, but I just wanted to share that was our thinking as we created the high school schedule back in August. Because kids had their schedules; we wanted them to keep those, and it’s not–when you think about maintaining the safety, the mitigation standards, at the high school, it’s completely different from any other level because of the way the high school schedule runs.”
View video of full Board of Education meeting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrDF0koYUg8
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