The administration at Dickinson Public Schools realized that opening on a hybrid schedule would be difficult for some students and their parents and has come up with a solution to help some of them -- opening up its at-cost Regional After School Program to students all-day for a fee.
In the district’s hybrid schedule, students will be attending school face-to-face on alternating days in an effort to cut capacity in each school by 50% on any given day.
Some parents were confused by the move. Parent Tara Keator commented on social media, “I’m sorry, so what’s the purpose of day on day off? Or if we pay Covid can’t come in? This makes no sense.”
Assistant Superintendent Keith Harris responded to the confusion, “The reason we went to hybrid is not because we thought kids should sit at home every other day. It was because we wanted to maintain those safety precautions to provide a safe environment for those kids to attend. We can do that with a full-day RASP, and so we’re doing that.”
Six classrooms in Hagen will house around 90 students per day; due to the alternating schedule, the program will be able to serve a total of 180 students.
“One of the reasons why the RASP program is as limited as it is, is because we are trying to maintain the same criteria for social distancing, masking, all of those safety precautions that we have for the students while they are attending school on their face-to-face day,” said Harris. “We’ll expect our kiddos to wear masks; we’ll be doing temperature screenings before they enter; we’ll be monitoring them throughout the day; we’ll be doing social distancing throughout the day, encouraging handwashing; we’ll be using the enhanced disinfecting of the rooms.”
He said the district chose to offer the program all-day because it saw multiple benefits to students, parents and community members.
“The number one benefit is we think it’s good for kids,” Harris said. One of the main activities that students will be involved with in this all-day RASP is they will work with paraprofessionals on the online learning aspects that are going to be required of kids while we’re on this hybrid schedule.”
He added that it also benefits kids by allowing the district’s teachers who have young children to remain in the classroom each day, as they won’t have to change their schedule to fit their child’s.
“We also know that there were some essential workers around town, for example in our hospitals and health clinics, that we were able to provide a place for their students to go on those off days, which allowed some of those essential workers to continue to go to work,” Harris said.
The district will now have two separate RASP programs which, although they are housed in the same building, will not be sharing staff or rooms.
“The full-day RASP will be for the kids who did not attend school face-to-face that day, and that will run from basically 7:45 to 4 p.m. Then the after school RASP will be for the kids who did attend school face-to-face that day, and that runs from the end of school to (5:45 p.m.),” Harris said.
Registration from the program is now closed, but if the program isn't filled to capacity, Harris said the district will reopen registration.
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August 29, 2020 at 02:00AM
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DPS offers all-day RASP for students to alleviate virtual learning concerns - The Dickinson Press
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