Toms River School Plan: Teachers In Buildings, Students At Home

TOMS RIVER, NJ — When the 2020-21 school year begins on Sept. 8, school buildings throughout the Toms River Regional School District will be occupied. Administrators and clerical staff will be in school offices. Custodians will be cleaning and sanitizing. And teachers will be in classrooms.

What won't be in the buildings, for the most part, will be students, as the district is opening the school year with remote instruction in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The requirement for teachers to come into their classrooms to teach their remote lessons was announced last week in a letter from Superintendent David Healy. It has not been welcomed universally by teachers in the district, however.

During the public comment portion of last week's board of education meeting, some teachers called in and criticized the requirement on several points. One called the requirement punitive. Others raised questions about child care for their own children, who would be home while their parents were teaching from school buildings.

"Why can’t teachers choose to be in a classroom?" one teacher asked during the public portion of the board of education meeting last week. "Why can’t you just treat them as the professionals they are?"

"Our job is to provide a meaningful, quality education for children," Healy said in response to the question. "We thrive on quality of instruction with no distractions."

"We understand there are hardships and they are challenging," he said. "Those same hardships are being experienced by our 10,000 or so parents."

The plan is for the district to return to some in-person teaching in November, after the break for the election and teacher convention the first week of November, giving the custodial staff a full week for a deep cleaning. But Healy has said that date could be moved up sooner if conditions allow.

Scott Campbell, the president of the Toms River Education Association, said he had been in discussions with the administration over the reopening plans for weeks, and said the desire was for students and teachers to be back in school, but one of the criteria was to do it safely.

"Everyone has that same mission and same goals," Campbell said.

The conflict is similar to what school districts across the state are facing, a conflict that is pitting teachers against parents insisting that children return to the classroom.

Toms River, which has an enrollment of more than 15,000 students, had been planning to start the year with a hybrid of in-person and remote instruction. It's now one of 180 districts that have asked for state permission to start the year with remote instruction.

Healy has said staffing was the biggest obstacle that led to the change to remote learning.

Officials had been struggling to find long-term substitutes for 48 staff members who had requested long-term leaves ahead of time, due to things such as maternity leave.

That was compounded by a growing number of staff members who were seeking to take leaves of absence or were seeking to teach remotely, numbers that left the district unsure it would have adequate instructional staff. Substitute teachers who work on a per-day basis are more scarce — the district had 30 percent of its daily absences not filled by a substitute in the 2019-2020 school year — and because subs with certifications are more difficult to come by, just turning to substitute teachers to fill the gap wasn't a workable solution, district officials said.

That led to the decision to seek permission for fully remote instruction to start the year.

"Our challenges are exponentially greater than most school districts in the state" simply because of the size of the district, Healy said.

About 60 percent of the district's parents indicated in surveys earlier this summer that they wanted to return to some form of in-person instruction. And — as has happened many places — the decision to go to remote instruction for students angered many of them. For some, the need to return to work so they can pay bills is paramount. But some parents have complained at various points since school ended in June about what they said was inadequate instruction during the spring quarter while everything was remote instruction.

Cara DiMeo, assistant superintendent, said the district has been working to address problems that happened in the spring, which were because teachers and staff were operating in crisis mode due to the rapid shutdown.

Expanded software tools and training aim to help teachers who were still learning how to maximize the live lessons (what educators refer to as synchronous learning) on Google Meets. And the district was in the process of buying more Chromebooks and setting up a program through Verizon that will enable students in low-income families to have access to the live lessons along with other students in the district.

Healy said the district is trying to work with teachers who are facing challenges because of child care and concerns because of health issues — either their own or in their families.

"There are legitimate issues," he said.

The Ocean County YMCA will be operating its YKids program in the schools, but one man who called in to the board meeting said the YKids full-day care program is cost-prohibitive for many teachers.

There also are plans being worked out to align school opening hours, since busing tiers aren't an issue with students learning remotely.

Healy said that staff members are expected to be in the buildings in part because the district will be transitioning to having in-person classes again, as required under the state Department of Education's restart plan — a goal Gov. Phil Murphy has said is critical as well.

Special education students will be in the buildings four days a week, because of the specialized instruction so many require.

Administrators will be in the buildings, as will food service workers preparing meals for the children who receive free or reduced-cost lunches. Because the plan is for YKids to be in the building, the school resource officers will be in the buildings as well to provide security.

"The only thing is kids won’t be present physically" for instruction, Healy said. "We want to get back to normalcy if you want to call it that. That’s the plan the governor expects of us eventually."

"Students will return to a learning model that’s not what everyone wants but it’s what’s available to us," Campbell said. "It's not perfect. It won't be perfect until everyone is back doing what they were before March."

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