Kansas parents, students and teachers want to know: Will schools reopen this fall?

Heather Ousley is more than the president of the Shawnee Mission Board of Education. She’s a mother of three. And like other parents, she’s ready for a return to normalcy.

“I very, very much want them back in the buildings in the fall,” she says. She speaks for many.

But what do education officials even know about going back to school this fall? The truth is, thanks to the coronavirus, not much at this point.

In Kansas, that’s saying something. The state’s education establishment and its front-line teachers moved heaven and earth, and more quickly than many in the country, just to come up with a way to finish the current academic year while schools are closed. In fact, 20 or more states have asked to see what the Kansas plan was for distance learning this spring.

Each of the state’s 286 public school districts and other private school entities, following broad Kansas Department of Education guidelines, created their own plans to finish the school year, chiefly using a mix of online learning and lesson plans sent home. Teachers and administrators turned on a dime to get it done, as have parents and students.

How remote learning is going across the state will be the subject of a report to the Kansas Board of Education next month.

“Kansas is being seen as a leader in this area,” says Denise Kahler, KSDE director of communications and recognition programs for the Kansas State Department of Education.

The Shawnee Mission School District has been a leader in its own right, particularly on two fronts.

First, the district’s sometimes controversial $20 million decision to equip all its students with laptops or tablets, beginning in 2014, looks absolutely prescient today.

Second, when it came to deciding how to figure 2019-20 grades due to the abbreviated academic year, Shawnee Mission decided to use third-quarter grades as a floor. That way, while learning remotely, students can only improve their grades, not hurt them.

Considering the newness of it for everyone and the inherent inability of some students to participate fully from home, as well as the fact that some districts around the country are hitting the easy button and simply giving all students A’s, the Shawnee Mission approach appears to be a fair and balanced one.

“Striking the right balance between accountability and grace is something that we are all learning as we go,” Kahler said.

The Shawnee Mission district also boasts some amazing remote-learning participation rates: At its last board meeting officials announced up to 97% of students have participated online. That success is all the more impressive when you realize that many school districts around the nation are losing track of some kids entirely, due to a lack of current contact information or the students’ failure to respond to messages.

Given all this, the fact that neither Shawnee Mission nor Kansas education officials can say what the next school year may look like tells you just how up-in-the-air this all is because of continuing concerns about COVID-19.

“We’re assuming we’re going to be back in school. That’s the assumption. But honestly, we don’t know,” says Janet Waugh, Kansas Board of Education member for District 1, which covers all of Leavenworth, most of Wyandotte and portions of Johnson and Douglas counties.

“This is an unprecedented situation, which means to most of your questions the truthful answer is: We don’t know yet,” Mark Tallman, associate executive director for the Kansas Association of School Boards, told The Star. Even schools that reopen might do so with various restrictions, he said.

“We, like the rest of the country, don’t know what the future holds, so we have to prepare for the possibility that distance learning would have to continue in the fall,” says Kahler.

That, in turn, means students and parents need to prepare for it as well.

This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 5:00 AM.