TEMPLE, Texas — Texas superintendents had no idea what was coming in Thursday's 3 p.m. phone call from the Texas Education Agency explaining new rules for the school year regarding COVID-19 protocols. A day later, they are still figuring out how to make the rules work.
Some of the new TEA rules are mandatory, many are optional, and at this point, remote learning may not even be an option. Temple ISD Superintendent Bobby Ott explained the new challenges to 6 News Friday.
District Requirements
School districts are not allowed to mandate masks. They will be required to report COVID-19 cases to the local health district and state, and must exclude students from attending school in person if the student is actively sick with COVID-19 or has tested positive for the virus.
And according to the new public health guidance, that is largely it. There are plenty of additional guidelines in the document, but they are things that school districts "may" or "should" do. These include rules parents would normally expect to be required.
Safety measure optional
According to the guidance, "the school system may deliver remote instruction consistent with the practice of remote conferencing outlined in the proposed Student Attendance Accounting."
But "may" is not a requirement and that's just the beginning. Conducting reoccurring COVID-19 testing is optional. Notifying parents if their child is a close contact to a student who tested positive for the virus, is optional. In fact, schools are not even required to do contract tracing in the first place.
According to the TEA guidance, "Given the data from 2020-21 showing very low COVID-19 transmission rates in a classroom setting and data demonstrating lower transmission rates among children than adults, school systems are not required to conduct COVID-19 contact tracing."
According to Temple ISD superintendent Bobby Ott, using data collected when masks were required to predict what will happen when they are no longer required is nothing short of ignorant.
"To hold up last year's data to say 'we had low transmission in schools,' therefore quarantine and contact tracing is no longer required in schools, but then completely overlook the fact that schools last year had the option to require masks, this year nobody does, and to not recognize that would have far different implications going into this year... to me that is just senseless," Ott said. "For me, I'm disappointed."
Ott said, without masks, the close contacts in a COVID-19 case could easily include the rest of the class.
Not every school will provide contact tracing, and Ott said he would still need to discuss options with the TISD board. At this same time, his stance is strongly pro.
"How could we stand up and say that we are practicing safety protocols without contact tracing?" Ott said.
And if school districts do send students home, it's going to be much harder to provide remote learning this time around.
Remote learning
"Remote conferencing is not remote learning and parents need to understand the difference. Remote learning means I need to keep my kid home for a grading period, or however long, and that's not the same thing," Ott said. "Can my kid do virtual education? The answer is no."
Ott said remote conferencing may only last up to 20 days and will require a waiver from the state if it goes beyond 20 days. While remote conferencing does not require a certified teacher, it must be provided at the same time that the regular class would occur but can't be taught by the existing in-class teacher. Ott said finding more teachers is already difficult enough. Here, the school district wouldn't even know what instructors to hire until particular students test positive and needed help with a specific class.
"The state has set it up in a way that it is not a viable option," Ott said. "It is a logistical nightmare, the funding isn't even there for it."
The easier option, Ott said, would be to have teachers work with students and send assignments electronically at home.
Ott said TISD had other emergency plans in place if a whole class or the entire wing of a school would need to be taught remotely. It won't be easy though, and Ott said the district would have to pay the entire cost.
6 News contacted multiple school districts Friday to find out how the new TEA rules would be implemented. The districts won't have those answers until next week.
