Masks, sneeze guards and recess: How Beaufort Co. schools’ first hybrid day went
More than half of Beaufort County School District’s 22,000-plus students will return to school buildings this week, and Monday saw the first wave of “hybrid” students — about 6,600 children in total — stepping into a school building for the first time since March.
Hybrid students are going to school buildings two days a week (either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday) and staying home work three days a week. All students receive virtual instruction on Wednesdays, when buildings are deep cleaned.
At Red Cedar Elementary, Alexander Bean’s second-grade class was logging onto Gimkit, an online game where students earn points for solving math problems. Seven students were in the classroom, while another eight — six Thursday/Friday hybrid students and two virtual-only students — were in a Zoom meeting on Bean’s computer.
It took about 10 minutes for the kids to begin playing. Bean repeated a code to log into the game at least five times, with kids unmuting themselves on Zoom to ask for it again.
One student who couldn’t remember her password sat with a whiteboard, tapping her foot and completing her own problems as her classmates plugged in their computers.
The students who had received the code alternately pulled up their masks to cover their noses and drew on the game’s “lobby” screen before it started. A second-grader named Uriel showed off his drawing — a heart with a smiley face next to the word “school.”
At the Sept. 23 school board meeting where the hybrid plan was announced, superintendent Frank Rodriguez said he wanted the district to spend “at least four weeks” in the hybrid model before transitioning to five days a week of in-person classes for students.
Overall, 60% of the district’s students will begin hybrid instruction this week, while the other 40% will remain virtual.
But across the district, there are wide disparities in the percentage of students returning to each school building.
Hilton Head Island Early Childhood Center and Bluffton’s Michael C. Riley Elementary School each have 80% of students going back, the highest numbers in the county; at Whale Branch Middle School, just 18% of students chose hybrid instruction.
At Whale Branch Early College High School, 25% of students elected for hybrid instruction. The school has 450 kids in total; only 112 chose virtual, with 62 students with last names in the first half of the alphabet attending school on Monday.
Principal Mona Lise Dickson said her school’s ratio was largely due to the outsized effect COVID-19 has on Black people.
According to previous reporting by the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette, Black residents made an estimated 17.9% of Beaufort County’s 2019 population. As of August they accounted for 23.3% of the county’s COVID-19 deaths and 28% of its COVID-19 hospitalizations.
The first high school progress reports of the school year came out Sept. 25, the last day that parents could switch their children’s class registration between hybrid and virtual.
Dickson said about 70% of students were doing well and the school was “hitting hard” on the other 30%.
In some cases, they’d encouraged students to switch their registration to hybrid classes before the deadline; in others, students liked virtual so well that they’d switched to that from hybrid.
Kathleen Corley, the principal at Red Cedar Elementary School, said that virtual school was “the best thing since sliced bread” for some students: Those who could focus well without supervision and didn’t want to socialize while getting their work done.
For others? Not so much. Red Cedar Elementary has one of the highest percentages of hybrid students in the county, with 76% of kids returning to the building this week.
Corley explained that 5- to 7-year-olds struggle to remember their schedule for Zoom classes, and that with two days in the classroom, it was easier for teachers to troubleshoot the tech problems they’d seen students have at home.
“We’re adapting and adapting and adapting,” Corley said. “We need to get used to this. And by the time we get used to this, we’ll probably — hopefully — be back to five days of in-person instruction a week.”
For Chloe Clark, an 8th grader at Beaufort Middle School, hybrid classes meant a more hands-on approach to learning. At that school, 39% of students had selected hybrid classes.
Chloe described herself as a visual learner, but said that she had trouble getting help on Zoom.
She was taking a Spanish class that would sometimes have the chat function turned off, and it was harder for her teacher to correct her pronunciation when she had to mute and unmute herself rather than saying it in class.
Alexis Hines, an 8th grade math teacher at Beaufort Middle, agreed.
“They talk to me more now,” she said of her students. “They didn’t on Zoom. They’d use chat to avoid talking.”
‘Is that six feet?’
Back at Whale Branch Early College High, Dickson was running a command center from the school lobby, patrolling the neon-taped roundabout she’d put in the open area to control foot traffic during class changes.
What would normally be a two- to three-minute class change had swollen to 10 minutes across the district’s high schools. Slowly, the intercom rang out with instructions for each hallway to release its students.
As ninth-graders entered the lobby from the freshmen hall, they carried a laptop bag and a transparent plastic “sneeze guard” with them, but no backpacks. At each class, they set up their own sneeze guard on their desk.
New students called out their teachers’ names, and Dickson and three school staff members directed them down the right hallway, reminding them to all walk in the same direction and avoid the taped-off hexagon of space in the center of the room.
One girl squealed as she saw a friend and ran for a collision course. Dickson quickly redirected her.
“Is that six feet apart? I don’t think so!” She turned to explain. “They haven’t seen each other in months.”
At each school, teachers were running into first-day issues with the new safety requirements.
“It’s great to see the kids’ faces, even if it’s just the eyes,” said Karen Boss, another 8th grade math teacher at Beaufort Middle. “I think the biggest challenge is that this is the first day the kids have to wear the mask all the time.”
Red Cedar teacher Bean peppered his instructions to students with directions to put their masks back over their noses.
In the hallway outside, he reminded students to stand on the fox stickers on the floor as they walked; if students could stick out their arms and touch each other, they were too close.
Principal Corley said she and another teacher found two students earlier that day hiding behind a trash can with no masks on. Once she reminded them to separate, she said she asked them where their masks were; they’d put the masks in their pockets.
“I think maybe they were telling themselves that they were outside, so it was fine,” she said.
Students can’t play basketball or use the playground, since both involve shared equipment; instead, Corley said, she’d been reading a website called Asphalt Green, which gave suggestions for equipment-free games.
However, kids could get mask breaks outside. A few minutes after second-grade classes ended recess, teacher Molly Lloyd led a line of four fifth-graders to the school’s new outdoor classroom. Each sat six feet apart and slowly took off their masks.
Corley looked on.
“I don’t look like it, but I run marathons,” she said. “You can get past the first five or six miles on happiness alone. And then the real race starts. We’re in the beginning miles.”