All Boston Public Schools to start school year remotely - The Boston Globe

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Pernio Watson, a vocational teacher in Boston Public Schools, holds a sign ahead of a caravan protest in Boston on Aug. 13. BPS staffers were calling for a safe school restart.Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff/The Boston Globe

Boston Public School students will start the year at home, Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced Friday — but the district is aiming to begin reopening classrooms in waves as soon as possible.

The plan calls for students to begin remote learning classes on Sept. 21. Then, depending on the course of the pandemic, some students with high needs would be the first to return to classrooms on Oct. 1.

From there, schools would begin opening up to all other students under a hybrid model in which some would attend classes on Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday. All other days would be remote.

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Preschoolers and kindergartners would report to school the week of Oct. 15. Students in grades 1-3 would follow the week of Oct. 22. The next crop of students would come in November: Grades 4-8 the week of Nov. 5, and grades 9-12 the week of Nov. 16.

“We feel this is the best approach to educate our children,” Walsh said during a press conference Friday, noting that this is not a decision that has a consensus. “It creates a staggered approach for students to return to the classroom in a safe and careful way. It’s the best way to tackle the opportunity and achievement gaps in our city. We’re going to continue to make remote learning as high quality [as] possible.”

Walsh emphasized the flexibility of the plan. He said that planning for school reopening is an “ongoing process,” and officials will continue to monitor public health data and ensure it’s safe before bringing any students back to the classroom.

Under the plan, parents will also reserve the right to opt their children out of in-person learning.

“I want to reiterate and I want to be very clear that any BPS family can opt in or opt out of the hybrid model. All students have the option to learn remotely five days a week,” Superintendent Brenda Cassellius said, speaking alongside Walsh at the press conference. “But we also know that some of our students are more vulnerable than others, and some of our students need in-person instruction more than others.”

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Boston joins about 30 percent of other districts statewide in reopening schools remotely this fall. Most other districts are doing a mix of in-person and remote learning, according to state data.

The reopening decision, made in the last 24 hours, caps off months of public debate and planning. Walsh and Cassellius had been increasingly pushing to reopen classrooms on the first day of school, but the Boston Teachers Union was aggressively fighting the effort.

Safety was fueling the hesitancy of teachers in returning to classrooms, from concerns over poor ventilation in the system’s decades-old school buildings to the health conditions of many members or their families. About two-thirds of educators indicated in a recent union survey that they or someone in their household were at high risk for severe COVID-19 symptoms.

The union had been advocating for a phased-in start for much of the summer, believing it would give the district more time to prepare facilities and would also allow teachers to focus on improving remote learning before being asked to juggle both in-person and remote learning simultaneously.

Meanwhile, the district’s most recent survey of families revealed that none of the options garnered majority support. A mix of remote and in-person learning had the strongest showing, with 38 percent of respondents favoring it, followed by full-time remote at 29 percent and full-time in-person had less than a quarter of support. Others were undecided.

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The district this week, in preparing for a hybrid model, began to formally ask parents whether they would like to send their children to school part-time or to stick with full-time remote learning. Each of the city’s approximately 125 schools were also supposed to file reopening plans with school district leaders.

The course of the virus remains unpredictable in Boston, which experienced a slight uptick in cases this summer, and disease experts suspect the city could experience more cases when college students begin returning in the next few weeks.

Across the country, many college students who have already returned have been partying in crowded venues and engaging in other close-contact activities, including sports. Consequently, COVID-19 outbreaks have popped up in such places as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame University, and Iowa State University.

Such a scenario could be very problematic for the Boston Public Schools, which doesn’t provide school buses for students in grades 7-12 and instead gives them MBTA passes, putting BPS students on the same subways and buses as college students during rush hour.

Beyond the complication of college, Boston itself has widely varying rates of COVID-19 cases among its neighborhoods. As of Aug. 10, East Boston had the highest weekly positivity rate, 7.9 percent, and across its borders the neighboring cities of Chelsea and Revere already decided to start the school year remotely. For the city of Boston, the overall weekly rate — a measure of how many people tested are found to be infected, and an indicator of the virus’s trajectory in the community — was 2.6 percent.

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Felicia Gans of the Globe Staff contributed to this story.

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James Vaznis can be reached at james.vaznis@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @globevaznis.

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