District U-46 School Board members approved plans Monday to create an online remote learning “academy” in the fall that will be open only to unvaccinated students who have approved medical conditions.
The decision comes in the wake of an Illinois State Board of Education resolution that calls for a complete return to in-person classes in the 2021-22 school year. The only exceptions would be for those children for whom COVID-19 could be health-threatening.
According to the resolution, “all schools must resume fully in-person learning for all student attendance days, provided that … remote instruction be made available for students who are not eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine and are under a quarantine order by a local public health department or the Illinois Department of Public Health.”
U-46 board member Melissa Owens criticized the state’s move at Monday night’s board meeting.
“Where I’m getting a little tripped up is the fact that we still will have a sizable population coming back on Aug. 16 that most likely will not have access to the vaccine,” Owens said.
“We have so many families that are multigenerational households where they have family members that may be at risk should a child come to school, especially a more-crowded condition, even though we’re going to try to live by social distance guidelines as much as possible,” she said.
Owens acknowledged the district’s “hands are tied on this,” but questioned why the state would make such an abrupt about-face when most of the current school year had students doing remote and hybrid learning because of the pandemic.
Suzanne Johnson, U-46 deputy superintendent of instruction, told the board the distance learning academy would be open only to K-12 students who are unvaccinated and have medical conditions in which serious complications could develop if they contract COVID-19. Parents must provide a signed statement from a medical professional for their child to qualify.
Students would be required to remain in the academy program for the full school year, Johnson said. Additionally, some courses may not be available.
“At the high school level, this (academy approach) is a focus on graduation requirements,” she said.
Distance academy students will still need to complete assessments at a physical school site and can only do classes at their own home with “a chaperone vetted by U-46,” Johnson said.
Academy applications are available online through the Infinite Campus parent portal on the U-46 website and must be submitted by 4 p.m. June 2. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be made by the end of June.
Those in the distance academy would learn apart from students who are in physical classrooms. Teachers would be assigned or hired specifically to teach remote classes.
Further complicating matters, Johnson said, is the requirement that regular school students who are exposed to COVID-19 exposure must quarantine and do online learning while they are out of school.
“In that case … it’s very likely where we would see concurrent instruction,” Johnson said.
Still to be determined is if academy teachers will report to a school building or work remotely, she said.
“We’re going to need every room and instructional space we can find,” Johnson said.
All students who are vaccinated must physically attend school.
“We really want to make sure we can commit to students who must really have the academy and make sure we do it well,” Superintendent Tony Sanders said.
The state’s edict puts more of a burden on district administration, and the academy is “what we can realistically put together at this time,” Sanders said.
Currently about 53% of the district’s 36,000 students are doing distance learning, according to the U-46 website. Vaccines are only available for those ages 12 and older.
Mike Danahey is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
