Parents pushing for five-day in-school classes plan protest at Midlands board meeting
Some parents are planning a protest ahead of a local school board meeting Monday, pushing the district to get students back in the classroom full time.
The Facebook group “5 days f2f for district 5” is calling for parents to gather at Irmo High School ahead of a meeting of the Lexington-Richland 5 school board.
Parent and organizer Jennifer Valek wants parents to gather along the street by 5:30 p.m. so they will be visible to board members as they arrive for a 6 p.m. meeting.
“Bring signs, be creative, let’s get their attention,” Valek said in her own Facebook post.
Valek said she was supportive of the district’s original plan to reopen schools in the fall, announced in July. But the district changed track a week later to a hybrid model, citing the ongoing spread of the coronavirus in South Carolina. Under the hybrid plan, students are in classrooms two days a week and learn virtually three days. Parents also can choose an all-virtual option.
A Chapin resident, Valek said many parents are eager to get their children back to school. She was glad her children got a day in class when schools in the district reopened this week.
“My kids got back the first day, and they loved it,” she said. “They wanted to go back, and I had to say, ‘that’s not how this works.’”
She worries that “kids are suffering mentally and socially” the longer they are out of class, and that teachers won’t be able to teach as effectively through a computer screen. She wants the district to stick to a proposed date of Oct. 8 to return to five-day-a-week classes.
Board member Jan Hammond, who also teaches social studies at Northside Middle School in Lexington 2, said she hopes the board will vote to lock in the Oct. 8 date for five-day classes.
“What bothers me is we never voted to approve this (reopening) plan,” Hammond said. “The board majority just wanted to let (Superintendent Christina Melton) plan everything. We haven’t really had a lot of input.”
The messages she’s received from parents support moving to a five-day plan, she said, “with the caveat that, if there’s a huge breakout, I’d certainly vote to change it.”
She agrees from her own teaching experience that the hybrid model limits the time teachers have to do an effective job. Lexington District 2 also opened with a hybrid option of two in-classroom days a week and three virtual days. Parents can also choose an all virtual plan.
“I tell my students I’m not going to be able to teach you as much as if I had you here five days, but I’ll teach the heck out of you while I can, and then on virtual days I’ll give assignments that magnify what I already taught,” Hammond said.
Other parents in a District 5 Facebook group were nervous about how returning to schools full-time could be done safely, and said they wanted to see how well the hybrid model works before moving forward.
“I don’t want my children fully virtual but i don’t want them 5 days a week with an entire school either,” one parent wrote.
Valek said she supports schools taking precautionary measures when they do return to school, but worries the question could divide parents pushing for a swifter reopening.
“I would like to see them do temperature checks before they go in every day,” she said. “But I don’t want this to turn into a mask fight.”
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