Harvard elementary, junior high schools set to bring students back for in-person learning Monday

Students in select grades will enter their classrooms at Harvard elementary and junior high school buildings Monday morning for the first time all school year.

As part of Harvard Community Unit School District 50′s transition into offering more in-person learning, all Jefferson Elementary School students as well as pre-kindergarteners, kindergarteners and sixth graders at other schools will be welcomed back into buildings Monday morning, Superintendent Corey Tafoya said.

“[This] is part of what we’ve said we wanted to do all along is to just have these cohorts introduced slowly, so we can get used to the systems the building needs to follow with all the mitigation procedures,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “So we just start small and gradually, hopefully, get bigger and bigger.”

The district has been remote all year and is now taking a more gradual approach than other school districts in McHenry County for two main reasons, Tafoya said. First, they didn’t want to put staff and families through the back-and-forth switches between learning models that many other districts experienced as infection rates improved over the summer and then worsened later on in the fall.

Second, they decided early on that looking at the rate of community spread in Harvard was more important than looking at what other districts were doing, he said. Harvard has been hit harder than other areas in the county, reporting 1,390 total cases as of Wednesday with only about 14,100 residents, according to data from the McHenry County Department of Health.

“We’ve really been very aware of that because not only does that affect obviously the students and the plan and overall safety, but that affects our staff,” Tafoya said. “So now it looks like we’re making progress to the point where we feel like we can do this and it wouldn’t be this back-and-forth type of thing.”

Starting Monday, students in select grades who want to come back for in-person learning will be split into two cohorts that will attend school either on Mondays and Tuesdays or on Thursdays and Fridays, Tafoya said.

Families were surveyed to see how many want to send their students back into school buildings, he said, and that number varies from 80% of kindergarteners wanting to return to only about 65% of Harvard High School students. The district’s gradual approach will also be a more flexible one as parents are allowed to change their mind on whether they want to participate in the cohort model or stay remote as the plan progresses.

Jefferson Elementary School, which houses fourth and fifth graders, will be able to welcome students of both grades back into the building Monday, Principal Judy Floeter said Tuesday. She estimated about 30% of the school’s families opted to stick with remote learning.

Teachers will instruct in-person and remote learners simultaneously with the help of a “copilot,” Floeter said.

The school started by bringing in about 40 students this week who were identified as needing an extra week to jump back in because they had been “really struggling with online learning” or have insufficient access to the internet, Floeter said.

Also coming back on Monday are the kindergarteners of Crosby Elementary School, the pre-kindergarten students of Washington Elementary School and the sixth-grade students of Harvard Junior High, Tafoya said. These schools will then bring back the next highest grade level each week until all students are able to participate in the district’s hybrid model, he said.

Harvard High School students will be the last ones to go back for in-person learning on March 15, but the school has already begun offering in-person opportunities for specific clubs and small-group academic activities, such as the school’s certified nursing assistant, or CNA, program.

The end goal is to have all students back for in-person learning on March 15, a target date the district set after the winter break, Tafoya said.

Floeter said she and her staff cannot wait to have more students in their classrooms again.

“We’re so excited to have the kids back, we’ve been chomping at the bit really,” she said. “This community has been hit pretty hard, so we’re really doing everything we can to make sure that everybody feels comfortable and everybody feels safe.”