KC-area private schools open up, see enrollment grow as public options stay online
After some public school districts announced they would start the school year with most students at home, Maranatha Christian Academy started fielding calls.
“Enrollment numbers shot up even this week, once the Shawnee Mission school district and others announced they were not going to open in a normal fashion,” Janet Fogh, head of school, said last week. “Three families are here right now touring. We accepted seven or eight different families yesterday. We’re doing tours as fast as we can. It’s really surprising.”
The private school in Shawnee was among the first in the region to bring students back to class, on Aug. 10. Its roughly 320 students are having their temperatures regularly checked, playing sports with precautions, social distancing and wearing masks most of the day, except at gym and recess.
“We’re just very excited to open our doors and have kids back in class. And we’ve gotten great support from parents,” she said. “In a week and a half, we haven’t had any COVID-19 cases, which we’re considering an answer to prayer.”
But with more parents looking to enroll their students, Fogh said, the school faces some logistical problems. Classes, which typically have fewer than 20 students, have been redesigned to allow for social distancing. She said the school will have to repurpose and renovate other rooms to add more classes, and is looking to hire a few extra teachers.
Across the Kansas City area, public schools are starting the year with a patchwork of plans as they interpret health officials’ guidelines. Independence opened all schools this week, but older students will have a hybrid of some in-person class and some online. Kansas City Public Schools will teach all online. But in Johnson County, Shawnee Mission is all online, while neighboring Blue Valley and Olathe will have younger kids in classrooms part-time and older kids online only.
“The longer we have (students) in a remote-learning situation, the further and further we are putting them behind the starting line when they are ready to begin university,” Courtney Goddard, a Shawnee Mission parent, told the school board on Monday. “I personally have a spot saved for (my son) at St. Ann if they remain remote.”
Indeed, Vince Cascone, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, said that principals at its Johnson County schools are receiving more inquiries from public school families. Some of its schools open this week.
“We have some schools where public school parents have contacted us and we have wait lists because of social distancing,” Cascone said. “We’re going to try to accommodate anybody that would like a Catholic education. We want to find opportunities to accept the students in, but we also want to make sure we’re doing it in a safe way.”
Private schools open
Across the region, hundreds of parents have been protesting the decisions made by their public school districts, many of which have decided to start the school year with most students learning online. At Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission board meetings, for example, parents and student athletes held signs that read “open our schools” and “let them play.”
At a rally in Lee’s Summit, parents shouted, “Zoom is not a classroom” and “Sitting at home is not a way for students to learn.”
But private schools face many of the same risks as public schools, as COVID-19 cases surge in the Kansas City metro. Health officials have advised against most students returning to class full-time.
Like public districts, many private schools are offering online options. And some are waiting to bring all students back to class. But typically with fewer students in each school and classroom, some school leaders interviewed said they feel confident that they’ve put enough precautions in place to open their doors.
On the Missouri side of the metro, Rockhurst High School, a private Jesuit school, was one of the first to open earlier this month. Spokesman Robbie Haden said “enrollment has remained strong” with nearly 1,000 boys, a typical number. The freshman class, with 253 students, was filled by mid-July.
Pembroke Hill School, a private college-prep school, held its first day of in-person class this week. Spokeswoman Beth Bryant said the school expects to have 1,170 students enrolled this year, a slight uptick over last year.
“We opened on Monday with reduced class sizes so that students and faculty could become familiar with the updated policies and procedures we are putting in place because of COVID-19. It was a very smooth first day of school. We will have reduced class sizes for the next two weeks,” she said.
Reopening plans
Across the region, private schools have implemented many of the same safety precautions public schools planned: masks, frequent hand-washing, continual deep-cleaning and social distancing. But there are notable differences.
At Rockhurst, Haden said students will use a mobile app to respond to a health screening each day, and they’ll walk through thermal scanners to have their temperatures taken. Large areas, such as gyms, theaters and athletic facilities, are being used as classrooms to allow for social distancing. Students have their lunches delivered to their classrooms so they can eat while staying six feet apart.
Pembroke students will wear masks and sit in desks with Plexiglas surrounding them. The school has also installed outdoor tents to provide additional outside classroom space.
And whether all students will be allowed back in class also depends on the school. Rockhurst is allowing students back into classrooms, but all classes also are being streamed through Zoom to students wishing to learn remotely. Pembroke and others also offered an online-only option.
In Johnson County, some of the Catholic schools begin classes this week, with elementary students learning in person and older students in a hybrid model — going to class part of the time and learning from home the rest.
And when Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Overland Park starts the school year at the end of August, it will implement its own unique plan. The school will start with a “cyclical” learning model. The first week, students will learn online. The week after that, students will return to classrooms. Each week, students will alternate between learning models.
Adam Tilove, head of school, said the strategy is aimed at limiting the risk of exposure among students and staff. If a student is exposed to coronavirus during an in-person week at school, the hope is that he or she would be learning from home by the time the virus is communicable, he argued. Including weekends, students would stay home for nine days in between in-person weeks.
The method was spelled out in a New York Times opinion article in May. A committee of 16 administrators, doctors, health experts and stakeholders crafted the school’s plan, which could change to all in-person or all online, depending on the rate of COVID-19 in the area.
“We’ll have social distancing, hygiene, pods (of students) and everything else. But we also have this other layer of precautions, which is timing, that I think makes teachers feel more comfortable and is an extra precaution,” he said.
Many private school leaders said they are doing all they can to follow mitigation strategies and plan for inevitable COVID-19 cases. Tilove said for his school, that also means a slow start.
This week, students will return to school for just over an hour, to pick up materials for online instruction and learn what the upcoming school year will look like. In some ways students will have to relearn the most basic parts of going to school: things as simple as how to enter a classroom and where to sit.
Tilove said that even though private school teachers will likely instruct fewer students than in public schools, the fears are the same. Many worry about the risks of contracting coronavirus and spreading it to their families.
“Teachers went from being on this really weird summer break to becoming essential workers. So it’s weird and adds tension,” he said. “Some parents want their kids to go back to school, and I don’t know that everyone has taken into account that for teachers, that’s a big step. A lot of people don’t feel what it’s like to be a teacher, from what I see online. No one wants to be in this situation. Everyone wants to be in school.”
This story was originally published August 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
