Top priority

Listening to the parents of the Colby School District on Monday night, it wasn’t always easy to get a clear and consistent picture of what is going wrong in the district. According to some parents, the biggest problem is the overreliance on contact tracing and quarantining to stop a disease that is really no worse than the flu. Others are upset about the district’s lack of control over COVID-19, allowing kids to come to school even though they should be quarantined.

There’s one thing both sets of parents agreed on — the need for a more robust virtual learning option. Although some teachers are providing meaningful online instruction, this does not seem to be the norm across the district. As many parents have pointed out, this is unacceptable.

This isn’t a new issue for the district to deal with. Last school year, with COVID-19 peaking throughout the country, educators had to be prepared at any moment to have their students sent home if they got infected with the virus or even if they were identified as a close contact. Going into this school year, it seemed like a lot of people assumed that the pandemic was mostly over and that concerns about outbreaks and surges were primarily a thing of the past.

This turned out to be dangerously shortsighted wishful thinking. Within a couple weeks of classes reopening, the Colby School District saw 31 of its students and three of its staff members testing positive for COVID-19. Based on close contact tracing, an astounding 211 high school students were supposed to be quarantined at home by the beginning of this week. According to the most recent enrollment numbers, that’s 67 percent of the entire high school population.

A school simply cannot adequately educate students in a situation like this without a reliable online learning option. Based on the conversations Monday night, the biggest problem is a lack of consistency across the teaching staff. Some teachers have wholeheartedly embraced online instruction, while others have dragged their feet. When asked about livestreaming classes, superintendent Steve Kolden mentioned that cameras were offered to every teacher last year, but not all of them agreed to take them. Board member Teri Hanson was right when she said the online cameras should have been a requirement rather than an option.

We’re not suggesting that it’s equally easy for every teacher to simply upload what they’re doing in the classroom for students at home, but there needs to be an across-the-board effort. Our suggestion is for the district to use money from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) to encourage the spread of best practices among the faculty. Specifically, teachers who excel at getting their content online should be paid bonuses for teaching their colleagues how to do the same. In addition, teachers who are lagging behind could qualify for extra pay if they met certain improvement benchmarks.

ESSER funds should also be used to upgrade cameras in the classrooms. A teacher who spoke at Monday’s meeting said small, stationary cameras attached to computers are not expansive enough to capture instructors who move around the room during class. Digital camera technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, so the district shouldn’t have problems finding the right ones for teachers.

Obviously, the number of students sent home on quarantine won’t remain as high as it is now forever. The school board’s decision to require masks inside classrooms should significantly reduce the number of students who get caught in the close-contact trap. But that doesn’t mean that new COVID-19 cases won’t continue to pop up throughout the year, along with quarantines. And it will be important to have online instruction options available even after COVID subsides. Eventually, it will become part of the regular routine for students who are stuck at home for whatever reason.

The Tribune-Phonograph editorial board consists of publisher Kris O’Leary and editor Kevin O’Brien