Even as several neighboring school districts have closed due to a surge in positive COVID-19 cases, Northern Lehigh School District officials say the schools plan to stay open for the foreseeable future.

“Right now, our goal is to keep the buildings open at all,” Superintendent Matthew J. Link said. “It’s a struggle every day; even with coverage and staffing in every single one of our buildings where we are stretched very thin, when teachers are out, when support staff is out, when administrators are out, the whole entire team has done a phenomenal job just trying to keep the doors open. That’s the state of operations that we’re in right now.

“School buildings around us continue to close; our goal is to keep the doors open, in some cases, another day, another week. Again I will agree that nothing replaces our teachers; they are trained minimally four years to do what they do, many of them eight years, 10 years, 12 years; it’s hard to compete with that quality of direction, and right now the focus of all those teachers, administration and students is just trying to get through each day.”

Link’s statement came in response to two residents’ questions regarding school options.

Resident Kay Barhight submitted a question during the school board’s virtual meeting on Monday in which she shared two options and said she would like an answer as to why either of the options would not work to increase in-person education time for the students.

Barhight said the first option is that in hybrid model, students, every other week, would go an additional day on Wednesday.

“Since teachers are in the building every Wednesday, I can’t see how deep cleaning is getting done during this time, so why can’t students be there,” Barhight said. “In a two-week time period, this would give five days in person and five days at home; you would just need to change your deep cleaning schedule to occur one week on a Tuesday evening and the other week on a Wednesday evening, this would allow children with IEPs to be in-person five days a week.”

Barhight then presented her second option.

“In 1995, I believe we had to make up snow days and they extended out the school day, why can’t we do that now,” she asked. “Have the kids in an extra 60 to 90 minutes a day and reduce the school day on a Wednesday to compensate for the additional times that teachers are spending in person so they would be working the normal workweek hours.

“If both scenarios are acceptable, maybe give the teachers a vote on which one works better for them. It’s understood that the options have to change time to time based on a cases; however, when you’re in a hybrid model, there should be better alternatives to what is happening now.”

Board President Gary Fedorcha weighed in on the situation.

“For us to be asked to make those decisions as a board tonight without researching everything is a bit unfair,” Fedorcha said.

Link thanked Barhight for putting so much thought into those two options and asked for some courtesy to look into the options further before making a decision.

Resident Pauline Grady asked how the district is building the missing months in, and added parents believe this model isn’t working.

Link said he fully recognizes that there are some parents in the district who believe the model isn’t working, but that he gets emails supporting what the district is doing.

“I know that it is a divided situation,” Link said.

“Our students learn best in front of our teachers,” Link said. “We’re trying to balance that with our health and safety plan.”

Resident Ariel Sly said to give the parents a choice, and added they want the option for five days, because parents can’t work and teach at the same time.

Director Michelle Heckman asked Link to explain in the buildings how being in a hybrid protects them given CDC guidelines, and asked what the county recommendation was versus what the district is doing with other superintendents from neighboring districts, why the district is not five days a week.

Link said the recommendation from the state and department of education is that all school districts and charter schools in Lehigh County go to five days fully remote.

“Collectively, the superintendents in the county, including myself, said, ‘no.’ We said we want to continue in the current model of whichever it is for that particular school district; for us it’s the hybrid model with a five-day-a-week online option.

“We believe that the hybrid model is being successful through the health and safety lens because we’re able to get to the 6-foot social distancing within the classrooms. We know that our students and faculty are following the face covering guidelines, they are constantly washing and sanitizing their hands, we are able to limit the ridership on our school buses and vans; we have a natural divide from when we have to do contact tracing, which we’ve had to engage in to say we can eliminate this group of students because they were not even in the buildings.

“In some ways there’s kind of natural transmission gaps that are in place for when the students and faculty are in our buildings. We can’t control what they do outside other than to please ask them to work with us and continue to practice safe measures outside of our school day outside of our buildings. But with all those mechanisms in place, we’re able to limit the potential exposure within our building. We’re just trying to keep the doors open five days a week for the hybrid model. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s how we’re operating right now.”