By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Kansas Department of Education has released what they call Gating Criteria as another set of data points to help local school districts navigate how open schools should be based upon COVID-19 disease spread. Certain criteria would be considered in the green, yellow, orange or red areas.
"They chose to go with these four different colors across five different criteria," said Mark Tallman with the Kansas Association of School Boards. "That makes it a little bit complicated. Basically, it's all about number one, how does your absentee rate compare to a year ago? How does the spread in your community look based on new testing results or percent positive? What's the capacity of your local hospital? They really want you to look at those kinds of criteria, see where they fall on that color scale and then you just kind of make a decision, overall, where does that put you?"
Generally speaking, criteria in the green would be normal in person schooling with the additional masking and handwashing requirements put out by the governor. Yellow would suggest that middle school and above should consider hybrid learning. Orange would push the higher grades toward online only instruction and red would be full remote only learning.
"One of the reasons this was developed was because in very small districts you might have a situation where one or two cases, on a percentage level, could look very high, but it's still not indicating very much," Tallman said. "On the other hand, you may be in a small place and you're saying, we're only having a few cases, but is it the start of something?"
Some school boards want to decide individually what happens with their schools, some would rather see their county's board of health or health officer be the final arbiter because they are more familiar with the data since the beginning of the pandemic.
"Things are very different and unique around the state," Tallman said. "That's why this is not a specific mandate. It really goes beyond the original guidance, which was only really looking at, kind of, are your cases going up or down? This tried to add some other things to look at."
A constraint the gating criteria does not look at is the absentee rate of teachers, particularly as it relates to teachers in hard to fill specialties like higher order math and science courses where it may be impossible to get a substitute with equal qualifications.