Pleasant Valley discusses online instruction

Pleasant Valley School District’s Acting Superintendent Charlene Brennan said Monday there are no cases of the coronavirus in the school district.

However, with one case reported in Monroe County by the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the board discussed what would be needed for online instruction at the building and grounds meeting Monday night.

“As of this moment, I don’t know where the case is in Monroe County,” Brennan said.

“I want you to know that we are on this,” she told the school board. “We are, myself and the team, are watching this. We are getting updates from the Pennsylvania Department of Health all the time. We are constantly watching the CDC website.”

Brennan said Monday she thinks the district’s schools are some of the safest places to be right now, because of all the additional sanitizing, cleaning and scrubbing that the custodial staff has been doing.

“We just want to emphasize there is no need to panic. We’re not panicking,” she said.

Brennan said her leadership team is meeting Tuesday to discuss plans on how the district would handle an outbreak if it comes here.

“We want to be proactive,” she said. “We want to have plans in place should the governor or we ourselves find any need at any point to close schools for any period of time.”

Brennan said it’s not easy to close schools, because there are many issues. Not every student has an internet connection for online instruction, and instruction for special education students could be difficult. Then there are the issues of child care and that the school district provides breakfast and lunch for some students.

Donna Yozwiak, school board president, asked if the school district knows how many students do not have an internet connection.

Lee Lesisko, director of technology, said he didn’t have that figure with him, but he knows that 43 percent of the schools district’s students are in the free or reduced lunch program.

Director Laura Jecker said, “Just because they have free or reduced lunch does not mean that they do not have internet.”

A family can have a high income but several children and qualify for the program.

Brennan said that even if a family has an internet connection, they might have one device that can connect to it and several children.

“You can’t have three or four children on a computer at one time,” she said.

Another problem could be the bandwidth in the home. If the bandwidth is not large enough to allow for multiple children in the home to have access, then the response time will lag and instruction in this form isn’t practical.

“That’s why it’s so complicated,” she said. “Every child in the home cannot receive instruction.”

Brennan said she is reading about what other school districts are doing and saw that one in New Jersey has decided to go back to textbooks for home instruction. That way, all students have the materials they need for instruction. She is also considering putting out a survey to parents to gain more information.