In February 2021, the Norwin School District began dismantling safeguards against the transmission of COVID-19 in an effort to switch students from 2-days a week of in-person instruction to 4-days a week in-person.  The 4-day in-person model already includes grades K-4 and the Senior class.  Further expansion of the 4-day model into grades 5-11 ignores both the advice of health experts and the likely threat of COVID variants coming to the region soon.  

Hybrid instruction has split students into Blue and Gold groups since the start of school in August.  Each group receives two days a week in person and two days a week remote instruction, alternating so that only half the students are in-building at any one time.  While not perfect, the hybrid model is a compromise that allows social distancing which is endorsed by health experts to help reduce transmission of COVID 19.

Norwin Administration wants to bring back all remaining students 4-days a week as soon as it can.  To assist with planning, families of students in grades 5-11 recently received an online survey that gave them two choices. 

CHOICE 1: Students continue in-person instruction either as 2-days Hybrid or 4-days in-person instruction.  However, parents must agree that social distancing will not always be possible as students return to classes 4-days a week.  

CHOICE 2: Any family that does not agree to diminished social distancing must leave in-person instruction and go fully-online in a separate program.  Norwin recommends the Norwin Online Academy, but these courses aren't taught exclusively by Norwin teachers so there is no guarantee that the pace and content of an NOA course will match up with where a transfer student was in their original classes.

There is a third choice that Norwin families deserve.  

CHOICE 3: Norwin acts in agreement with guidance from health experts and stops the expansion of the 4-day program in favor of maintaining the current Hybrid model.

We all want students to be back in school as normal, but these are not normal times.  Acting as if the threat has passed ignores the real risks to students, teachers, building staff, and all members of the community that any of those people come in contact with.  In addition, the more people we have in the buildings, the more they risk a spike in COVID cases that triggers a state-mandated switch to fully online instruction for two weeks.  Nobody wants that outcome.

This year has been tough on lots of families in Norwin and it is great that the Administration wants to support students who are struggling in the hybrid environment.  However, Norwin has lots of resources that it can creatively deploy to help these specific students without mandating a risky change for the entire district.

For the above reasons, we ask that Norwin stops expanding 4-day in-person instruction into grades 5-11 and stay the course with Hybrid instruction for the remainder of the 20-21 school year.