APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – As the Appleton Area School District begins to implement their Fully Virtual Plus learning model this week, parents are still pushing to get all students back in an actual classroom.
While the new offering appears to be a step in the right direction, parents say it’s extremely limited.
“What they actually addressed in their board meeting is that it’s only kids that are at risk, so they’re already failing or they’re taking a hands-on course such as welding,” said parent Andrea Klitzke. “It kind of seems like, to get our kids back in school, we have to have them already failing and falling through the cracks for them to get help.”
Klitzke is part of a group of parents who have protested the school board and made other efforts to get their kids back in school. She says the district has already had a trial run of students in school buildings.
“They already have pods of YMCA-Care children that are doing their school work right next to each other, already in the classroom. And there are several schools that have YMCA-Care programs,” Klitzke told WTAQ News. “I haven’t seen the outbreak in those programs so they’ve kind of already have a small trial group of kids I’m not sure why they’re trying to initiate another small trial to justify it.”
She says while the virus is serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly, it’s important to see that some schools in the district are already allowing students back, some since August, and aren’t seeing issues.
“We’ve been asking them – ‘how are the other schools able to do that?’ – and every single time we get the same unanimous answer, which is ‘I don’t know.’ They fully admitted that they did not do the research to find out how it’s working,” Klitzke said. “They’re looking at the data of community-wide spread. They’re not actually narrowing down to – what does research say about kids in school? There’s a variety of articles coming out saying ‘Hey, all these schools are opening and things are fine!’ But the school district refuses – I mean, they won’t even respond to our emails.”
Klitzke even pointed to reports from the district’s chief financial officer, Greg Hartjes, who has visited other schools to see how they are mitigating the spread – and has said there’s nothing the other districts are doing that Appleton wouldn’t be able to handle.
“It’s necessary to be flexible and go back and forth, because it’s not working for the majority of families to have their children do virtual. My kindergartner sits in front of a computer for 6-8 hours a day. That’s not normal…If things go bad and blow up, then yeah, pull the kids out by all means. We’ve seen some districts do that. Neenah stepped away for two weeks and then said ‘Okay, we’ve got it all cleaned up, everyone’s clear, let’s come back,'” Klitzke said. “They’ve been promising parents and the community flexibility in these learning models, but they haven’t really held true to that. So I think it’s important that the public gets answers to that.”
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