Crystal Lake District 47 to re-start hybrid learning in January

Crystal Lake Elementary School District 47 is planning to start bringing its youngest students back in a hybrid learning model starting in January, with all kids set to go to a hybrid schedule by February.

Remote learning will continue for the first week after students return to school from winter break, but drop-in services for special education students will continue. The district started bringing students in special education back for these services on Monday.

District 47 began the first six weeks of the school year remotely, before going to a hybrid model, which included some in-person learning, on Oct. 5. Then, in November, as COVID-19 cases and other health metrics rose, the district went back to remote learning.

At a Monday evening school board meeting, District 47 Superintendent Kathy Hinz said that on Jan. 11, hybrid learning will begin for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade and all self-contained special education programs, while students in third through fifth grades will start hybrid learning on Jan. 25.

Students in grades six through eight will be the last to start hybrid learning on Feb. 8.

Hinz said this incremental approach will allow the district to monitor its ability to maintain staffing levels, which have been a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also bringing the youngest learners, and students in special education, back first.

Contributing factors in making this decision, Hinz said, include that COVID-19 health metrics, including the area’s positivity rate, have been steadily dropping over the past several weeks, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reduced the quarantine period from 14 days, to seven to 10 days. In addition, Hinz said, the district has not seen the expected spike in COVID-19 cases that was anticipated after Thanksgiving.

Children’s daily schedules will not change, whether their families chose to keep them in remote learning or the hybrid schedule. From 8 a.m. to noon, students who chose the hybrid model will be in-person, while from 2 to 3 p.m., all students will be in virtual learning.

Students will remain with their current teacher.

Families will need to continue self-certifying their children daily for COVID-19 symptoms, something Hinz said families had been doing a good job of when schools were in hybrid learning earlier in the year.

“We were grateful to have strong parent support,” Hinz said at the meeting. “For the parents that were doing a hybrid model, we had very little noncompliance with self certification every day with the kids, and they followed our quarantine protocols and were reporting things, and that helped us greatly with our hybrid model.”

When all 10 grade levels had students start at the same time in a hybrid setting, and community spread of COVID-19 was high, that was when the district started struggling with having students be in some form of in-person learning.

However, by having student groups go to a hybrid model every two weeks, “we feel that we can monitor that and not have to stop or reverse, which we know will be frustrating for families, disruptive to learning and ultimately works against what we want, which is having all of our kids in school,” Hinz said.

As of Dec.11, according to District 47’s COVID-19 dashboard, there have been 32 total in-person COVID-19 cases among staff and 63 cases among students to date, while there have been 14 staff members and 38 students who tested positive for COVID-19 remotely.

The total number of in-person quarantine or symptomatic cases since the beginning of the school year is 146 staff and 498 students, and the amount of remote quarantined or symptomatic cases is 77 staff members and one student.

While District 47's Lundahl Middle School, in October, had a COVID-19 outbreak, the district currently has none, Hinz said.

Moving forward, the superintendent said, the district will continue monitoring local data from the Illinois Department of Public Health, McHenry County Department of Health and other experts.

“We've been in consultation with the McHenry County health department, and they support what we’ve brought forward tonight,” Hinz said at the meeting.