Old Rochester Regional school district delays school year by 10 days

Aug 12, 2020

The school year will begin on Sept. 16 for the Old Rochester Regional School District, giving teachers an extra ten days to prepare three radically different classroom setups. 

After four of the district’s school committees approved the school year to at least start off on a “hybrid” basis that would offer the opportunity for both in-person and remote learning, the Joint School Committee met on Aug. 12 to discuss the schedule for the year. 

The state required the district to submit plans for hybrid, in-person and remote learning, and gave schools permission to provide only 170 days of instruction this year as opposed to 180, if ten days are used at the beginning of the year to train teachers. 

Old Rochester Regional Superintendent Michael Nelson said that educators “have not been in the building as a staff to be able to train,” since March. He recommended taking the ten days of training time.

The time to familiarize staff members with the specifics of the three plans and safety procedures will be useful, since Nelson said there was a “strong, strong chance we will be using all three of our learning models this year.” 

School Committee member Heather Burke said the training days would give teachers and parents alike more time to plan, but wondered “how we’re going to meet learning outcomes with the loss of these 10 days?” 

Nelson responded that the extra 10 days will give educators the chance to dive into answering that question. Before they even start, he is “extremely confident that we will meet the requirements.” 

School Committee member Tina Rood was on the committee that devised the plan for the Junior High and High school, and wanted to clarify that “there were long discussions regarding coming back full and in-person… it wasn’t just a jump to one idea.”

The superintendent said that though the district will not start in-person, that work will not be lost, as the school will be reviewing all three models and the local coronavirus data on a regular basis to determine if the district or particular schools need to switch between models. 

School committee members recognized the complexity of all the issues that surround the decision to go remote or return to in-person instruction, but asked Nelson to begin planning for which factors might prompt that decision. 

He said he would begin to consult with Public Health Nurses and the district’s physicians and involve school committee members when he had more data. 

Burke said it would be wise for the district to let parents know that the school calendar this year may not be “as rigid as it has been in the past.”