PORTLAND — The week before Oregon schools let out for winter break, approximately 53,000 students sat in a classroom with a teacher for some form of in-person instruction. By early February, that number had more than doubled.
An Oregonian/OregonLive analysis of state data shows that nearly 117,000 students experienced in-person schooling for at least two hours in the first week of February, approximately 97,000 of them public school students.
Still, fewer than 17 percent of the 561,000 students enrolled in the state’s public schools got to learn face-to-face.
Gov. Kate Brown told Oregon education leaders in late December she was relaxing the state’s role in school reopening decisions in hopes that “more” students, particularly elementary schoolers, would get some form of in-person instruction by Feb. 15.
By that vague and singular metric, the governor’s move proved successful.
Within one week after most Oregon schools went back into session following the winter break, the number of public school students who saw at least two hours of in-person instruction jumped from about 55,000 to 79,000. The state added an average of 9,250 students to that total weekly through the first week of February.
And the vast majority of those students spent significantly more than two hours a week back in school. Many districts, for instance, offered students multiple half-days of instruction.
In a statement, Brown lauded the efforts of districts that brought students into classrooms over the last six weeks. While the governor has said she believes in-person instruction is especially important for younger children, she urged districts to move quickly to offer the same for middle- and high-school students.
“It has been almost a year since most Oregon students have set foot in a classroom, and they are suffering,” Brown said. “The social, emotional, mental, physical and academic impacts of distance learning on our students have been well-documented. And, much has changed since last March.”
Brown said she’s consulted with teachers and superintendents over the last few weeks to better understand how to help educators feel safe returning to classrooms. In early February, she told reporters there were “legal tools available” to her in order to pursue a broader reopening of Oregon schools but did not specify what tools she might use.
Of her conversations with education officials, Brown said, “I am using my powers of persuasion.”
In the Portland area, however, very few public schools are allowing more than a handful of students with particularly acute learning needs into school buildings.
And it doesn’t appear those numbers will move much before districts let out for spring break on March 19. Most of the metro region’s largest districts do not plan on allowing a significant number of elementary schoolers back on campus until early April.
Only two, Lake Oswego and West Linn-Wilsonville, have set firm dates for elementary students to begin hybrid learning, a mix of in-person and virtual instruction. Officials in both districts say they’ll launch hybrid options the last full week of February.
Meanwhile, officials in the Tigard-Tualatin district say they’ll begin hybrid instruction for kindergartners and first-graders on March 29, the Monday after spring break.
Beaverton officials set a date of April 5 to transition their youngest learners away from fully virtual instruction. Portland Public Schools has indicated it will follow three days later.
Students in Portland and Beaverton whose parents opt for them to participate in those hybrid offerings will join either a morning or afternoon cohort for the rest of the year and attend class in-person for 2 1/2 hours on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in most cases.
Portland Public Schools officials say they plan to provide similar offerings for middle-schoolers. But they say that some state guidelines still make it nearly impossible to roll out hybrid options for high school students.
State rules require that students come into contact with no more than 100 other people during the week, which school district officials across the region say is a barrier keeping them from offering in-person instruction to high-schoolers on a wide scale.
In the metro area, only Hillsboro, Lake Oswego and West Linn-Wilsonville have announced preliminary dates or estimates for when high-schoolers might return to classrooms.
The Oregon Department of Education released a new set of reopening guidelines in the weeks since Brown’s late-December announcement. Those relaxed standards, along with a steep decline in coronavirus infection rates in the metro area, paved the way for districts to offer some form of in-person instruction for younger students.
But that doesn’t mean everyone is ready to return to the classroom.
Teachers unions have stiffly opposed reopening plans in Lake Oswego and Portland Public Schools. A survey of Reynolds district families showed about 16 percent of families would refuse to allow their child into a classroom this school year.
The Register-Guard reported that more than half of the parents and educators who emailed Springfield district officials in the weeks leading up to their hybrid reopening opposed the move.
In Lake Oswego, district officials announced they were postponing their reopening by a matter of weeks after educators pushed back.
Brown, along with researchers and schools officials at the state and local level, has said it’s essential younger students, in particular, return to classrooms as soon as possible. The youngest children at the elementary level are still adjusting to new day-to-day routines and learning how to learn, so to speak.
