By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The length of the impact of COVID-19 on schools is something USD 309 Nickerson-South Hutchinson superintendent Curtis Nightingale wants parents and community members to pay attention to.
For young kids, it's been years of masked and not masked and socially distanced and quarantines and all those things," Nightingale said. "They're in third grade and they have never known school not to be like that. If you'll think about our seniors, it's been eighth grade, freshman year, since the last time they had a normal school year. Our goal hopefully is we're trying to normalize it as much as possible to give them a great experience on their way out, because, I just hate to think of those seniors walking away and this is the taste they are going to have in their mouth."
COVID precautions are just one example of mandates that are handed down from levels above the local school.
"Quarantines, those are imposed by an outside entity that we have no control over," Nightingale said. "Then our legislators decide that we cannot offer remote learning to those kids without losing funding. That forces schools to try to figure out a way to not do remote learning for these students that are missing a week, two weeks at a time. We've got students that have already been quarantined three and four times this year."
Also, the annual testing is supposed to be normal this year.
"Those assessments are becoming higher and higher stakes, as it relates to what they are going to do with school funding next year, because that's all getting ready to change," Nightingale said. "We've got the federal dollars and the expectations that are set to those. We've got this entity out there that likes to publish school assessment scores as some sort of a grade in terms of how good or how bad a district is, not taking into account any of those other mandates."
Nightingale notes that not a minute to the day and not a day to the year has been added and yet expectations and results are expected to be at a much higher rate now than they were 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or even five years ago.