At Immaculate In Danbury, Small Class Sizes Keep The Doors Open

DANBURY, CT — The coronavirus infection rate in the city has not eased off much from the seven-percent trigger that prompted the state to issue a COVID-19 advisory, and public schools continue to teach their students remotely.

It's been a whole different arrangement in private schools, where class sizes are not as forbidding.

Immaculate High School, a private Catholic school in Danbury, has been in session using the hybrid learning model since it reopened after Labor Day. The school population has been split into two cohorts, with one in school Mondays and Tuesdays, and the other on Thursdays and Fridays. On Wednesdays, everyone learns from home, while the building is deep-cleaned. It's an arrangement not very different from that practiced by public schools in neighboring towns where the infection rates are low to moderate.

All the grimly-familiar COVID-landscaping is in place, including the demarcations on the floor designed to direct foot traffic flow, and classroom doors designated as either entrances or exits (but not both). The school has provided students with Immaculate-branded masks, and, as the lockers have been zip-tied off for the sake of safety, backpacks, as well.

Immaculate is breaking with the pack in its use of Microsoft Teams as its web conferencing and collaboration platform. Immaculate Principal Wendy Neil said that Teams is more secure than the more popular Zoom, which suffered a number of well-publicized exploits over the summer. Instead of the ubiquitous Google Chromebooks, Immaculate students are using Microsoft Surface Pro laptops, with the computers preloaded with the text books the students will need.

The school had been successful making an almost immediate switch from in-person to totally remote learning in the spring, but the hybrid schedule brought new challenges.

"We gave (teachers) two weeks to play around with the technology," Principal Wendy said, because "hybrid" means something different at Immaculate then in other schools. Elsewhere, "hybrid means the kids in front of you are learning and the other kids have some type of assignment at home. And that's not what we're doing here. Our kids are streaming into the classroom with their peer groups. We have teachers that are projecting the kids that are home onto the board for the other kids to see ... So Johnny, at home, could actually be working in a group with Susie, in the classroom, with one of them on the computer and one of them in the classroom."

The teacher can place Susie and Johnny together in a virtual "break-out room" to facilitate the collaboration, Neil said.

The fearless and forward thinking alongside the pandemic has rung phones in the Admissions Office, where Caitlyn Wardlow, digital communications assistant for Immaculate, said there has been renewed interest outside the school's target demographic:

"Public school parents wanting to come into a Catholic school that is smaller to begin with, population-wise, and then has all of these precautions in place," she said.

The problem of enforcing social distancing on buses pretty much solved itself for Immaculate. In previous years, the school offered bus service for their students coming in from Ridgefield, Wilton, Redding, Brookfield, Newton, and New Milford, but this semester there was insufficient interest. During a pandemic, it seems, parents are more inclined to drive their kids to and from school. Neil said the school does still have bus service for students who live in Brewster and Danbury, but social distancing on those lines have not been an issue.

"It's just one or two kids on a huge bus. It's almost embarrassing," she told Patch.

Neil said she meets regularly with officials from the Danbury Public Schools District ("They've been wonderful!") and everyone is keeping their eyes on the latest infection rate figures coming in from the Department of Health.

"We're taking it week by week. We're ready to go open full-time, and we're ready to go one hundred percent virtual. Whichever way we have to respond, we're ready to go. Obviously we're hoping the numbers go down."