Jersey City school children won’t be going back to their classrooms until mid-November at the earliest, and some students will be starting the school year without the technology to connect to their classes, Superintendent Franklin Walker told The Jersey Journal.
Walker said Thursday the district will not have Chromebook laptops in the hands of each of its 30,000 students hands before the start of school on Sept. 10 because a shipment of 5,000 laptops is only expected to arrive in October.
Citing a nationwide backlog in orders, Walker said “the indication is that they should’ve been in by now, but now we have the estimated time being in October.”
At the same time, Walker said the school district will conduct all-remote learning for the first marking period, which ends in November. He said committees went into the summer months with an idea of what needed to accomplished in COVID19-proofing classrooms and keeping students and staff safe, but the district is still not prepared.
“Our position was that it is better we operate that way for the entire marking period because it works better for the students … the teachers …. the curriculum … the learning and also in terms of the planning,” Walker said. “We want to give parents the opportunity and time to plan, so they know that from September at least until November the whole first marking period we will be operating 100 percent remotely.”
This decision is the second step back from the district’s previous plans to reopen the state’s second-largest school district after all schools were closed in March to stem the pandemic. The initial plan was to open with 33 percent of students returning in-person, then last month the district announced students would return to schools by the start of October.
The state’s “Road Back” plan says calls the school year to start with at least some level of in-school learning “absent a shift in the public health data.” Walker said Thursday that he’s comfortable waiting until November because of the current uptick in the statewide coronavirus transmission rate.
One Jersey City parent told The Jersey Journal her four children will have to share one Chromebook because School 11 ran out of Chromebooks.
“At this point, I am going to have one of them log in on Monday, of them log in on Tuesday, one of them log in on Wednesday and no one long in on Thursday and we start the rotation again on Friday that way they have equal absences,”Megan Verheyen said. “What other plan can I have?”
Walker said he would investigate the situation and principals will work with parents on a case by case basis to ensure their students can keep up with classes. The district is working on getting devices by other means, including donations.
“Everyone who has a need will receive a device,” Walker said. “There will be a few cases like that, but once we get all the computers in October that will help support where the needs are.”
Jersey City Together, a local school advocacy group, will host a town hall conversation with Walker via Zoom at 7 p.m. Thursday to discuss the coming school year. It will be aired on NJ Together’s Facebook Live page.