Nancy Edmonds Hanson

With the new school year just two months away, Moorhead School District superintendent Brandon Lunak says only one thing is for sure: “This fall will be like no other fall.”

That goes for Lunak, with 22 years’ experience in the rear-view mirror, and for every one of the almost 1,400 teachers, staffers and administrators who work in Moorhead’s public schools. Even more, it’s part of the educational future of some 7,000-plus students, from pre-school to senior high, and their parents.

What will “back to school” look like on Sept. 8 when the new term begins? At this point, the superintendent says, that’s in the hands of Gov. Tim Walz, the Minnesota Departments of Health and Education … and the coronavirus itself.

“We won’t find out more until the end of July,” Lunak says, holding up the 100-page guidance on safe opening already received from the state. “Only one thing is for sure. We will be educating our children, and doing it safely.”

Meanwhile, schools have been directed to plan for three different options – nicknamed “bricks,” “bricks and clicks,” and “clicks.”

The first is a return to classes in the regular bricks-and-mortar setting, albeit with extreme precautions to keep children, staff and faculty safe. Among the precautions cited by assistant superintendent Tamara Uselman: taking temperatures, persistent hand-washing, sterilizing of surfaces, limiting interaction (from the classrooms to the lunchroom and gym) to small groups, serving lunch in the classrooms, staggering the times children surge through the halls to avoid crowding, limiting buses to one child per seat, and possibly mandating masks – at least for those old enough to manage it.

The second option, “bricks and clicks,” is a hybrid of on-site and at-home learning. The switch could be required depending on whether the virus is resurgent in the community.

The third option, “clicks,” reprises a curriculum entirely of distance learning, as students and teachers employed from March 23 through the end of the school year.

“If something changes with the virus, we’ll need to be nimble,” Lunak says. “We may have to jump from one option to another.”

If you polled Moorhead’s teachers (and parents), he says, there would be an overwhelming winner – to return to as much normalcy as possible and get everyone back in the schools. “If you ask our staff, they overwhelmingly would love to be back in the classroom with the traditional model,” he says. “I think everyone agrees. Education is so much more than textbooks and worksheets. It’s the ‘hidden curriculum’ that counts to most – the relationships between teachers and their students, the social interaction between peers.”

He said this spring’s experience with distance learning “has brought renewed appreciation of what our staff accomplishes on a daily basis for our students.”

Uselman concurs. “Personally, I believe that for the country to get back to work, our kids need to be back in school … of course, with safety paramount in everything we do. Every piece I read emphasized that, as long as we can insure safe practices, we need to get our kids back. It’s important academically, but even more critical in socializing them and enabling them to find out who they are. It’s not only the teachers. Kids need each other, too. Relationships are the WD-40 of learning.”

Two months may seem little time to plan. But it’s far more generous than the two weeks schools were given in mid-March to abruptly switch entirely to distance learning. “I’m extremely proud of how everyone in the district picked up and moved the ball,” Lunak reflects. “Everybody was on board.” He adds that in the normal course of planning, such a dramatic change of direction would have taken two to three years. Instead, teams of K-4 educators split into teams based on subject areas, then developed the lesson plans in language, science, social studies and math that students completed at home.

“We did the best we could. Teachers did keep in contact with their students. Some have marveled at how much better they got to know them, along with their parents and even pets,” he says. “Was it perfect? No. Did we make mistakes? Yes. We learned a lot along the way,” including one critical lesson that shapes their deliberations on how to move forward in the coming year: Nothing can replace interaction between the student and staff member.

A district-wide survey this month revealed divided reactions among parents, who split roughly into thirds. One portion reported that distance learning was highly successful, better than they’d expected. Another third said it hadn’t worked very well. The last group pronounced it “just right.”

No matter how well distance learning worked over the past three months, both administrators agree new challenges will face teachers and students if “clicks” return this fall.

One challenge – if COVID-19 is out of control by September – is that all students will start school in a new class. That means they won’t already know their new teachers, and relationships will have to be built from the ground up. The pre-existing bonds between teachers and their classes helped bridge the gap in spring; it will be absent in September.

Another, Uselman notes, is that students with special needs will require staff to work through their educational plans with their parents. For those with individual education plans, Section 504 (Americans with Disabilities Act) and health needs, “we’ll need to review it all with their parents to assess the practicality and their comfort level with returning.”

Finally, students may not all be ready to move onto the next class level. The district is holding training next week on “minding the gap,” dealing with the reality that not all new 4th graders may have equally mastered the lessons of 3rd grade. “Teachers are going to have to know how far students got in mastering 3rd grade subjects. They may not be able to start out at the same level where they’ve begun before.”

Adjustments will certainly be made because, as Lunak says, “there’s no alternative.” But, as they adapted last spring, he says confidently that staff – and students – will meet the challenges and carry on this fall, whether they’re back together in the schoolhouse or scattered at home, at least part of the time.

As Uselman points out: “It’s hardly ideal, but it is doable.”