CMS reconsiders in-person learning plan after dire county health directive

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools board will hold an emergency meeting Thursday to reconsider the district’s plan to return to in-person instruction, officials said Tuesday.

The announcement came hours after Mecklenburg County Public Health Director Gibbie Harris issued a directive saying schools, businesses and individuals should move to “full virtual” operations wherever in-person activity is not required. CMS board chair Elyse Dashew said she anticipates holding an emergency meeting at 10:30 Thursday to address the directive from the health department.

Dashew said that while the health department does not have the authority to close CMS to in-person learning, Harris’ recommendation had to be taken into consideration moving forward.

“As a board of education, that responsibility has been given to us,” Dashew said of whether to stay remote or return in person. “But what I read in her directive was a strong sense of concern to utilize full virtual options for work and school, and I think we need to take that very seriously for the next three weeks.”

CMS originally planned to bring students in all grades back to in-person learning rotations beginning Jan. 19.

Previously, only pre-K, elementary, a small fraction of middle school students and students with special needs were receiving in-person instruction in the fall. In total, roughly 40,000 children were part of those rotations in the fall.

CMS board members further expanded Superintendent Earnest Winston’s ability to respond to COVID-19 cases in individual schools on Tuesday, granting him the authority to send specific classrooms and grades into remote learning.

‘We are ready’

Winston and some board members called on county residents to socially distance and wear masks so that schools can bring students back.

The district, Winston said, is ready from an operations standpoint to restart in-person learning. But the latest directive and COVID-19 metrics from the health department indicate the community is not ready to reopen schools safely, the superintendent said.

“Our evaluation of the factors within our control says that we are ready,” Winston said. “Our ability to open schools and keep them open with our students and staff depends on more than what we as a school district control. We are ready, but public health doesn’t have confidence that our community is ready.”

In the wake of the new directive, some private schools, including Charlotte Latin and Charlotte Country Day, announced they would immediately suspend in-person learning Wednesday while they worked out what the directive would mean for their operations.

The directive from Harris adds to the statewide modified stay-at-home order, which includes a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew. But unlike emergency declarations and executive orders, health department directives do not carry the weight of law.

“Our recommendation is that it doesn’t make sense to bring kids back to schools,” Harris told county commissioners during a meeting Tuesday where the directive was announced. But just one day prior, Harris said she believed schools could handle the same number of students they had in December.

More than 70 people spoke at the Tuesday school board meeting, with advocates for returning to in-person learning and supporters of staying in remote learning each making their case to the school board.

Parents who pushed for maintaining the Jan. 19 return date said they believed schools were able to keep up the safety standards to make in-person learning feasible.

Marie Palasciano, a CMS elementary school teacher and parent, said she was excited for the return to classrooms on Tuesday. She said her students demonstrated immense growth in November, when they began in-person learning days.

“I feel safe teaching every day in my classroom,” she said. “We wear our mask. We social distance. No job is 100% risk-free, but our safety protocols were working.”

But other parents said they only put their children in Plan B, or hybrid learning, because they believed the district would pull the plug on in-person learning when community spread worsened. They advocated for staying in remote learning, citing the worst measures of community spread that the county has seen since the school year began.

For weeks, the county has been in CMS’s “red zone” of substantial spread in positivity rate and new cases per 100,000 people over a 7-day period. The district’s guidelines say that when those metrics are that high for 14 days, it should consider remote learning for all schools.

Parents’ concerns

This week, the county reported a new case rate of 499.7 and a positivity rate of 15.8%, significantly higher than metrics that first prompted the December vote to pause in-person instruction through the first two weeks of the second semester.

Kate Murphy, a parent of two CMS students, urged the board to follow the metrics they had set for themselves earlier in the school year to monitor community spread.

“I chose Plan B because I looked at the metrics you laid out and said, that’s reasonable,” Murphy said. “But if you now send my kids back, and you’ve changed the data you’re looking at to make that decision, then I never would have signed my kids up for Plan B.”

Chavon Caroll urged the board to consider the disparate impact of the pandemic and what that means for students of color, who are more likely to be adversely impacted if they or a family member fall ill.

“This pandemic has disproportionately affected people of color, and specifically, Black people, who are at a higher risk of severe complications or death,” she said. “I implore the board to consider the students of color, who are the majority of CMS students.”

Teachers and parents also asked the board to stop making short-term decisions that only gave schools the ability to plan for a few weeks at a time.

They said students needed greater consistency, and that the constant weeks-long remote learning periods made it hard to build routines when students and teachers are left wondering if the return date will again be pushed back.

Between the first and second semester, nearly 7,000 CMS students opted into the remote academy, where they will stay in virtual learning even if the district begins offering in-person instruction.

While health concerns were a part of the shift, CMS principals said that many students expressed a desire for consistency, especially in the high school grades where students were better able to take advantage of remote learning.

This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 6:57 AM.