Beaufort Co. schools announces early in-person classes for some special ed students
Beaufort County School District’s 22,000-plus students will return to virtual classes on Sept. 8 — but starting on Sept. 14, as many as 220 could be back in classrooms while their peers remain online.
That number represents the district’s special education students with “low-incidence disabilities” — a group that deputy superintendent Duke Bradley said the district is “not confident at all that we could be able to meet even their most basic academic needs in a virtual setting.”
The group includes students who are typically served in autism-focused classrooms, deaf or hard of hearing, visually impaired, or severely cognitively or intellectually disabled.
“Our instructional leadership team quickly realized that students with severe intellectual or physical disabilities was a group that we needed to think differently about how best to serve,” Bradley told school board members Tuesday.
In the district’s group of approximately 220 students with low-incidence disabilities, 138 selected in-person instruction over virtual when the district surveyed parents in July.
The district then surveyed 25 special education teachers to determine if they were willing to hold in-person classes for these students. Twenty-three said they were.
Students will report to school buildings twice a week from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. for “face-to-face instruction and therapy services while keeping student groups small to ensure health and safety are maintained,” Bradley said Tuesday.
Bradley said the district will provide transportation and lunches for students participating in this “hybrid” model.
“We have always maintained that virtual learning is not as ideal as face-to-face instruction,” Bradley said. “This is particularly evident when it comes to meeting the needs of students with extreme intellectual and physical disabilities.”
“When we say we want success for all students, this is exactly what we mean.”
When will other students return to buildings?
The district announced Aug. 4 that all students would begin the school year online, after previously announcing a “hybrid” plan that let families choose between in-person and virtual instruction.
The district received word from the South Carolina Department of Education on Aug. 12 that “unless major health and safety obstacles exist, it will be a requirement” for districts to reopen buildings two weeks after their official start date, per DOE spokesman Ryan Brown.
Neighboring Jasper County School District, which began all-virtual classes on Aug. 17, received the same guidelines from the state.
However, Jasper spokesman Travis Washington said the school district had not received an update from the Department of Education on reopening school buildings as of Monday, which marked the end of that two-week period.
Beaufort County superintendent Frank Rodriguez told board members Tuesday that he was encouraged by new statistics from South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control that moved Beaufort County’s COVID-19 risk rating from “high” to “medium.”
The DHEC classification system has three metrics:
Number of new cases in the past two weeks;
Whether new cases have increased, decreased or stayed level over two weeks;
Percent of positives among people tested for COVID-19 in the past two weeks.
Beaufort County’s number of new cases fell in the “medium” risk category, with 199.9 new cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks — just under the threshold for high risk.
The trend in new cases fell in the “low” category, while the percent of positives among COVID tests — 13.9% — remained “high risk.”
Rodriguez said Tuesday he would like to see the percent of positive tests in the county drop to 10%, as well as “about three weeks of that consistency and stability” at the medium-risk level before reopening school buildings.
He added that the district would give “about two weeks” of notice before beginning in-person classes in addition to virtual offerings.
“If this positive trend continues, we will be able to open schools to all of our students who desire a face-to-face education sooner, rather than later,” Rodriguez said. “In the meantime, I’m glad we will be able to effectively serve certain special education students, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”
This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 8:59 AM.