Moscow schools to remain closed for semester

The Moscow School Board on Wednesday voted to keep schools closed through the end of the 2020 school year in a regularly scheduled meeting, participants participating remotely via Zoom.

Moscow Superintendent Greg Bailey said the decision means Moscow schools will remain in so-called “soft closure” and teachers will continue to deliver education through distance learning. He said criteria for reopening K-12 schools, handed down by the State Board of Education last week, would be near-impossible for many schools in the state to meet and so most have elected to remain closed.

“We just canceled it; we didn’t say, ‘well, it will reopen if these criteria points are reached,’ ” Bailey said. “Basically, what we decided was, if those situations occur, then we can just make a decision at that point. So at this point, we have canceled it for the remainder of the school year.”

Bailey said distance learning is no replacement for live instruction, but the state will continue to allow districts to replace in-person attendance with these strategies for the remainder of the year.

Bailey said the board also gave approval for Moscow elementary schools to move from letter grades to pass-fail for the remainder of the year. He said middle and high school students may also ask to be assessed this way on a case-by-case basis.

The move is intended to take some of the pressure off younger students, Bailey said, and allow students at the secondary level who may have had challenges with remote instruction to shield GPAs earned while more complete, in-person lessons were still in full swing.

“We’re keeping track of what we’re being able to teach and what we’re not and there’ll be a lot of communication next year at the very beginning of the year with the upcoming teachers (about) where kids are,” Bailey said. “We’ll catch them up — we feel comfortable, we will catch them up.”

Bailey noted students experiencing a crisis at home have missed 11 weeks of class or more, so the task of bringing students up to speed will not be completely foreign.

From his position on the Gov. Brad Little’s Emergency Council for Education, Bailey said it is clear that state agencies and education institutions at every echelon of learning are working in coordination to address challenges related to the pandemic — particularly those facing graduating seniors..

Bailey said many higher education institutions have made adaptations to account for the extraordinary circumstances facing graduating seniors including loosening or waiving requirements surrounding admissions. This includes waiving entrance exam requirements like the SAT and the ACT, which Bailey said have been canceled this year.

“That’s one reason why we kept the letter grades at the secondary level, because we do have some students that are working towards a very high GPA and they’re concerned about their 4.0,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that they could still achieve that if they wanted to.”

Bailey said the high school’s June 5 graduation has not been officially canceled but the chances of the district moving forward with an in-person ceremony on that date are slim.

Bailey said social distancing orders will have to be lifted before the district would consider having a live graduation ceremony. He said it would be difficult to have the event while honoring guidelines recommending people stay at least six feet apart.

District officials have kicked around a few “outside of the box” ideas for conducting graduation, but Bailey said the consensus appears to favor simply rescheduling the ceremony for a later date.

If it remains too risky to hold a ceremony in the summer, Bailey said the district would likely move the event back even further. He speculated the district may even look into collaborating with the University of Idaho to “piggyback” on its spring commencement, which was recently rescheduled for Aug. 1.

Scott Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.