Kansas City superintendent wants online-only classes and a delayed school start
Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Mark Bedell wants to delay the start of school until after Labor Day and then offer classes online only because of recent spikes in COVID-19 cases.
But the school board still has to approve his ask.
“There is no way I can recommend that we bring people back into our school environments given the records that are being broken here in the Kansas City area,” Bedell said. “What we don’t want to do is be an organization that commits any unnecessary and undue harm for our students, teachers or staff. If we don’t have a healthy workforce there is no way we can educate our students.”
School board members heard Bedell’s recommendations during their meeting Wednesday night. They will vote on the matter at a later date. The district had planned to start school on Aug. 24. If approved, the start would be delayed a little more than two weeks, to Sept. 8.
Bedell spoke a day after Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Health Department Director Rex Archer recommended that all schools in the city — including the 14 districts, charters and private and parochial schools — wait until after Labor Day to start in-person classes.
“There is no good answer for the situation we are in,” Bedell said. “Everything I am doing is to protect faculty, staff and students.”
Archer said his recommendation for a delayed school start was based on data showing a recent rise in new coronavirus cases among people under 19 in Kansas City. He and Lucas said they hope the delay will offer time for those numbers to decline and for schools to better prepare.
KCPS officials said they will use the time to provide additional training for teachers to deliver online instruction and to help parents become familiar with the online formats the district will use for each grade level.
When the number of cases has declined for 14 consecutive days, students will come back in phases, wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
Students in pre-K through third grade will be the first to return to 100% in-person classes. Health officials have said the youngest children are at lower risk for contracting and spreading the virus.
Students in grades four through 12 will start back to in-person class slowly, at first getting only a few days in the classroom and learning online from home the other days.
On Wednesday the Kansas State Board of Education rejected an order by Gov. Laura Kelly delaying the start of school until after Labor Day, but schools will still have to follow a separate Kelly directive requiring safety measures, including masks, sanitizing hands at least once an hour and taking everyone’s temperate at the start of the day.
Now on both sides of the state line, it is up to individual districts to decide when and how to start.
The Kansas City, Kansas, school board voted Tuesday to not only delay the start of school until after Labor Day but also to have classes fully online for the first nine weeks. Other districts are offering parents a choice of either in-person classes or online.
This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 10:25 PM.
