For Marlboro Schools, 4 Days Of In-Person Classes On The Horizon

MARLBORO, NJ - Less than three weeks into the 2020-21 school year, Marlboro Township Schools are preparing to send students back to in-person classes four days a week.

At a board of education meeting on Tuesday, the school district’s superintendent Dr. Eric Hibbs introduced the plans, citing a question “consistently asked” by parents: when will students spend more time in a classroom?

"What really came back most was the fact that kids need to be in school more and I honestly couldn't agree more," Hibbs said.

Watch the full Board of Education meeting below:

Marlboro K-8 students returned to school earlier this month on a hybrid schedule with most students attending in-person classes twice a week. According to the superintendent’s Phase 2 plan, students will be in classrooms for four and a half days per week on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Cohorts will attend school for four hours per day, with the remaining coursework to be completed via online learning activities. Wednesdays will serve as a completely virtual day.

In a letter to parents on Sept. 23 from the superintendent, Hibbs noted that the details discussed at the Tuesday meeting are “fluid”.

“We will release the full plan as soon as we have it in final form,” Hibbs wrote.

Under the plan detailed at Tuesday's meeting, elementary students are set to begin the Phase 2 plan on Oct. 5, with middle school students to start on Oct. 13. Pull-out resource students already began attending four days of in-person instruction on Sept. 21.

Parents will have the option to enroll children in the all-virtual learning option before the beginning of the second marking period, Hibbs said.

"The world that we're living in right now is not one that I can honestly see changing in the near future," the superintendent said during the virtual meeting. "There is debate right now between the president and the CDC about when the target date is for the vaccine and the concept of a vaccine is not something that we can even rely on to help us."

Last week, Patch reported that students at Memorial Middle School and Marlboro Middle School were placed on all-remote learning due to severe technological glitches and connectivity issues in the district. Read more: Marlboro Middle Schools Go Remote Due To Tech Issues

Simulations over the summer did not mirror the "catastrophic" technological issues experienced at the beginning of the school year, Hibbs said. Nevertheless, under the revised model, the glitches are no more.

“That tremendous load was lightened because we saw the bandwidth and we saw the firewall essentially never get into the dangerous zone,” said Hibbs. “In that moment, I knew I had a very difficult leadership choice … what I did know in that moment was that we had too much data trying to push its way through the firewall.”

Hibbs promised that the district will resolve all other technology issues in a “timely manner," with preventative work on districtwide firewall and bandwidth set to begin on Sept. 23.

“This summer we did a ton of complex planning. Even after everything came together, we realized at first that we were simply glitching. We didn’t really understand why and we had to dig into the ‘why’ of what was going on. So what we really found out was that our firewall essentially just couldn’t handle all of the active connections,” Hibbs said.

Marlboro Township Public Schools’ Network Administrator Tom Enny added that the Chromebooks that district staff were provided with over the summer caused issues with Zoom web conferencing.

All 500 staff Chromebook devices arrived broken, containing a “chip inside that was not compatible," according to Hibbs. “Our staff members had problems at times even navigating Google Drive. The two of those together caused a massive issue.”

“At some point, the CPU was so overloaded it wasn’t able to handle all the requests. At that point, it starts to drop the request and that’s when you start to see that glitch,” Enny added.

The district will be receiving replacement HP laptops, already paid for using the $130,000 originally allocated for staff Chromebooks. Marlboro staff will also receive an extra monitor to allow screen-sharing while viewing a class of children.

Hibbs says that the new laptops will be available to educators in approximately five days.

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