Evanston Township High School To Begin Offering In-Person Classes

EVANSTON, IL — Students at Evanston Township High School will have the opportunity for on-campus instruction next month for the first time in more than a year, administrators announced.

Superintendent Eric Witherspoon told parents the district plans to launch a hybrid option after spring break, which ends April 2.

"The safety and wellbeing of ETHS students and staff continue to be our highest priority," Witherspoon said in a note to parents. "ETHS remains committed to robust remote e-learning instruction for those who prefer to stay with that model."

A selection form is set to be sent Tuesday to parents and guardians, who must choose between remote and hybrid learning options by 4 p.m. Friday.

"Students who opt into in-person learning will attend one in-person session for a given course every other week according to a rotating block schedule," according to a description of the hybrid plan. "In this framework, students who are remote have the same access to instruction by the teacher and engagement with classmates as students who are in-person."

The dates for launching a hybrid learning schedule will be announced on March 9, according to Witherspoon, a day after the next meeting of the ETHS board.

Any teacher who wants to offer "hands-on experiences" to students must frame them as ungraded "enrichment," maintain synchronous check-ins with remote students and inform their department chair in advance, according to the district.

The announcement followed last week's cancellation of a planned webinar to explain the district's new "in-person experiences" options, which launched last month for "students in order to support their wellbeing and connections to their school."

For the first time, the district announced plans to offer a safe, socially distant environment for students to take part in remote learning and connect with peers and staff as part of its framework for in-person activities.

At a Feb. 22 joint meeting of the ETHS and Evanston/Skokie School District 65 boards, the boards received comments from 57 residents, most of which related to reopening plans.

Of the four incumbents up for re-election on the District 202 board, three — Gretchen Livingston, Patricia Maunsell and Patricia Savage-Williams — are seeking another term, while one, Jude Laude, is stepping down. No one else filed paperwork to run, meaning the board will have to appoint its eighth member.

While the high school districts to Evanston's north and west have reopened with a hybrid model of part-time on-campus instruction, Chicago Public Schools has not set a date for a return to campus. CPS elementary schools launched hybrid classes Monday.

The Coalition to Reopen Evanston Schools, a group that has been advocating that both local public school districts establish reopening plans, praised the announcement as a "step in the right direction" but said the reopening plan didn't go far enough.

"We applaud District 202 for taking this step. Unfortunately, the plan keeps teachers out of the classroom, and it's hard to see how ETHS will be ready for the '21-'22 school year if teachers have not had time to learn and get used to safety protocols," the group said in a statement.

"But it's a step in the right direction, and the doctors' group of our Coalition stands ready to help the District reopen safely, putting teachers', employees' and the most vulnerable students' safety first," it continued. "We urge the ETHS Administration to meet with this group of clinicians, who include local pediatricians, emergency medicine physicians, internists and child and adolescent therapists. They need to be at the table now more than ever."

Ahead of Monday's announcement, Dr. Valerie Kimball, an Evanston pediatrician and member of the group, encouraged administrators to create a medical advisory board.

“The science of reopening schools for in-person learning is now well established," Kimball said in a statement. "We owe it to the ETHS students, teachers, and staff — especially the most vulnerable — to get it right. There are numerous medical professionals from across Evanston who are eager to help."

District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton announced in January he would convene such a board, and students begin returning to class at the district's elementary school's Monday.

Speaking at last week's joint meeting, District 65 board member Sergio Hernandez he hoped that those who have gotten involved with the district as part of a push for reopening during the coronavirus pandemic would remain involved.

"I know we have a lot of parents who are very upset, and rightfully so, and as I am, for not being able to come back to school and have our kids back in school. And I know at D-65 we started a hybrid model," Hernandez said. "But [although] many of us in the community who, again, want our schools to open right away and open up fully, there's an equal amount of folks who don't have the time to tell us that they are deathly afraid to send their children back to school. And these are people of color. These are folks who are working out there, and who, again, are serving our community in grocery stores or the laundromats, who are nurses, who, again, are seeing this with their own eyes, who have lost loved ones because they're forced to work for our comfort, and to make our communities comfortable and our lives comfortable.

"So when I hear folks out there and [who] sent us these emails and messages around how their children are suffering, and again, I have been through that suffering prior to the COVID," he continued. "Black and brown communities and poor white communities have gone through an economic pandemic, a pandemic of lacking access to proper health care, a pandemic of structural racism that has cut access to them to opportunities, so again, what people are feeling, if this may be a new feeling to you, for a lot of us, this is something that we've been feeling for generations."

Speaking last month in a video message to the school community, Witherspoon said his administration was doing everything in its power to secure vaccines for district staff and working to review the newly released CDC school reopening guidelines.

"We are very much looking at how they apply to ETHS, but we also are very much into making sure we get it right — we get it right for our school, and for our employees," Witherspoon said. "I will emphasize something that I just need to say again that is very important to me: 52 percent of our employees are non-white. Non-white people in this country are contracting this virus 1.4 to 1.7 times more than white people, and they are dying at a rate of 2.8 times more than white people. For me, and for ETHS, being able to get our employees vaccinated is critical."