Gateway students to have option to return to school 5 days a week

The Gateway school board approved a plan that gets all students back in school five days a week by April 7.

District officials said 60% of parents who filled out a recent survey said they would be willing to send their children back to the school under the plan. The other 40% said they’d rather stick with a remote option.

The plan, which was approved in an 8-1 vote, means students in kindergarten through sixth grade would head back to school for five days a week starting March 29. The rest of the grades would return to five days on April 7.

Board member Susan Delaney abstained from voting. She was not immediately available to comment.

Students would still be able to enroll or stay in GATE, the district’s fully remote educational program.

The vote came exactly one year since schools across the state closed because of the pandemic.

The district has operated under hybrid and remote learning models since the beginning of the school year. Buildings have closed several times as the district responded to cases of covid-19 in students and staff, though it is unclear how many positive cases of the virus have touched the school district since the beginning of the school year and how many active cases there are now. The district has not published those statistics since November, when the last count was at 27 cases between students and staff.

Superintendent Bill Short said the school district will move back into a hybrid learning model should Allegheny County move back to the “substantial” level of transmission.

Allegheny County moved into the moderate level of transmission beginning Feb. 19, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Its positive case rate sits at 4.9%, as of March 17, according to the county’s covid-19 tracker.

PDE recommends schools stick with a hybrid learning model until both the incidence rate drops to 10 per 100,000 incidents and the positivity rate drops to 5% in a seven-day period.

In other words, “if fewer than 10 new cases are reported in a county in the most recent 7-day reporting period, the county will automatically qualify as exhibiting a low level of community transmission,” reads the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s information on instructional models.

Brian Goppman, the board’s president, said the board’s decision to approve the plan does not mean covid-19 doesn’t exist.

“I want to remind everybody and be very clear about this: this does not mean that this pandemic is over, that the virus is gone — that life is back to normal,” said Brian Goppman, the board’s president, moments after the vote approving the five-day plan. “As much as I’d love to say it’s back to normal, it’s not.”

He said everyone in the school buildings needs to continue to follow social distancing guidelines and wear a mask.

Before the vote, some residents addressed the board to express their support for opening the schools back up to five-day instruction. The board met in-person in the high school’s auditorium for the first time in months.

Kelly Matrazzo, a Monroeville parent of a ninth- and a sixth-grader, was happy to see the return to five days.

“Children need to be in school full time, among their peers and face-to-face with teachers,” she said, citing studies that have shown remote learning to be detrimental to children’s mental health and learning.

She said the covid-19 inoculations are on the rise and the positive case rate in Allegheny is decreasing.

“Once we are finally open, you and the board will be facing another enormous challenge – the challenge of figuring out how to bridge the large education gap that our kids will be facing once we resume the full-time schedule,” she said.