Kansas City schools hoped students could return next month. Now it may be next year
It could be January before Kansas City Public Schools children are back in classrooms, Superintendent Mark Bedell told his district’s board during a special meeting on Monday.
Based on the COVID-19 infection numbers within the district’s boundaries, Bedell said, students will not begin returning to in-person classes by Nov. 9, the target date KCPS officials had set last month.
And, he said, “I have my concerns that things are not going to get better after Thanksgiving either.” KCPS began the school year Sept. 8 with all students learning remotely.
KCPS would be the second district in the area to delay in-person classes until 2021. Last month, the Kansas City, Kansas, school board voted to wait until January, citing continued high numbers of COVID-19 cases in Wyandotte County.
Bedell said his district has been receiving conflicting data about coronavirus infections.
“I’m trying to figure out what data we should be looking at,” he said. “Reports we are looking at show us that the infection rate among people who are being tested is over 10% as it pertains to our school boundaries. That puts us in the red zone.”
According to data maintained by The Star, on Monday the seven-day positive test rate within Kansas City, Missouri, was 15.77%.
The district follows a color-coded gating criteria from local health officials to determine when to return students to in-person classes. Red is the least safe and requires remote learning only.
“My concern is around the adult-to-adult transmission,” Bedell said, adding that if teachers start becoming ill, schools might have to shut down.
“People keep saying that it is not happening in schools, that infections are happening in the community,” Bedell said. “Well it is happening in schools.”
He mentioned New York City and Boston schools, which opened with a hybrid of in-person and online classes this fall and then had to temporarily shut down because of the virus spread.
“I don’t want to be in a position where we open and then have to turn around and shut down in the next few weeks,” Bedell said. “But I don’t want to drag people along. If we are not able to come back until January, I want to have the data to make that decision.
“We have been pivoting a lot, creating a lot of frustration with our staff. We have to have some form of consistency.”
Bedell is meeting with Kansas City health officials on Wednesday for a clarification on infection rates and will make a formal recommendation to the school board that evening on how long they may need to wait to bring students back.
In the meantime, Bedell said, he is hearing from the parents and teachers of students with special physical, mental or emotional needs that remote learning is not working well for them.
He said those students — about 206, of which 59 are in early childhood — along with students with other challenges at home, will be among the first to return to in-person classes in some form in small groups. Other students will come back in phases, with the youngest students returning first and students in middle and high school last.
This month, the largest districts in Johnson County — Blue Valley, Olathe and most recently Shawnee Mission — have started to allow students in middle school and high school to return to classrooms part time.
On both sides of the state line, some parents have pushed for all students to be back in school full time, a demand that has led to protests outside district administration buildings, including in Lee’s Summit and several Johnson County districts.
Still other parents and some teachers have said they are worried that more students in school buildings could lead to more cases of the coronavirus.
The Kansas City metropolitan area added 338 new COVID-19 cases Monday, but no new deaths were reported. The area including Kansas City and Jackson, Clay and Platte counties in Missouri, as well as Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas, has a total of 49,602 cases to date.
This story was originally published October 26, 2020 at 7:27 PM.
