St. Vrain parents group seeks return to in-person learning

A growing number of local families are deeply frustrated with full-time remote learning in the St. Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD), and now they've banded together in an effort to get students back into the classroom. Earlier this month, five parents from Erie launched the St. Vrain Educational Advocates in hopes of bringing attention to their struggles and working with school and public health officials to combat the "unseen negative consequences" of keeping students isolated at home.

"We appreciate the board of health, and we appreciate the school board," SVEA founding member and spokesperson Dan Maloit said of his group's mission. "We're not trying to pressure them to a decision, we're trying to show that what's going on right now isn't working for everybody, and that they have our support to go back. We will accept some risk to get our kids back in school."

For Maloit and the other SVEA founders, Corinne Renteria, Joel Smith, Mara Harner, and Sarah Longoria, balancing the risk of keeping kids at home with getting them back into the classroom comes out in favor of the latter by a wide margin. According to a statement on the group's Facebook page, the SVVSD's distance learning plan is putting students at risk of "educational degradation, social isolation, abuse, neglect, and increased levels of stress and anxiety," by keeping them isolated and leaving them to grapple with new routines and unfamiliar technology on their own.

"We literally see the risk of them having decreasing mental health," Maloit said. "The statistics that our group will get into is the sudden drop-off in child abuse reporting, the increase in calls to the suicide crisis line, the increase in diagnoses of PTSD, depression, and anxiety within children and adults. That's real, and those are scary numbers, and that will lead to people dying or massive changes in their life as we go down the road."

Like most members of the group, Maloit and his family have experienced many of the downsides of online learning first-hand since the start of the 2020-21 school year on Aug. 18. He and his former wife, a staff member at Niwot High, currently have three students enrolled in the district-a sixth-grader at Sunset Middle, and a fourth-grader and kindergartner at Niwot Elementary. The two younger kids attend daycare at NES with other students, and log in to classes being taught by teachers down the hall. Meanwhile, Maloit's middle school student attends remote classes at home and can be alone for long stretches while his parents work.

"And it's kind of OK, but it's not OK," Maloit said. "He's not getting the education that he needs. He needs to be challenged. He has all A's the last time I checked, but I can tell he's not being challenged by it. The challenge is how lonely he is and how frustrated he is."

As for the younger two, Maloit finds their situation "logically incongruent" and said he can't quite reconcile the difference between learning at school in a small cohort led by daycare staffers or in one led by their teachers, who are already in the same building. "They've got a kindergartener and a first-grader and two third-graders in the same little daycare group, and they can't focus. Why not just have them in the classroom with their teacher?"

And it's not just his own kids that he was concerned about. Maloit acknowledged that many families, including his, are still better off than many others in the district. For families without his resources, the burdens of full-time remote learning are even more costly to bear.

"I am in one of the best scenarios that you can imagine, and I'm still watching my kids struggle. I can't imagine what it's like being a single mom, working two jobs, with two kids, and they might only have one iPad between them and a spotty Internet connection. ... They're going to fall behind... Data shows that if you disrupt education even for a few years, there are catastrophic repercussions down the road. Kids who change schools more than two times have major repercussions in their academic performance."

Maloit sat with these concerns for a while, but soon noticed similar complaints showing up in his social media feed. He was initially put off by the "anger" he saw on both sides of the debate, but finally decided it was more important to speak out on behalf of students and try to engineer a solution that works for all families in the district.

"I didn't want to start a fight, and I didn't want the town to rise up and be angry, but I was kind of curious about what people were actually thinking," Maloit said. "So I found a group, and about five of us met on Sept. 1, and we decided to move forward with this. So we created the Facebook group, and within the first two days we had already grown to 150 people."

It grew by 150 more in the next two days, according to Maloit, and by Sept. 14, it was at 757 and still climbing. Most of the members are from Erie, but Maloit said there are also growing contingents of parents from Niwot, Mead, Frederick, and Longmont coming aboard. SVEA also has drawn discreet support from some St. Vrain teachers, another overlooked player in this debate, Maloit said.

"There are so many good teachers out there that want to be back in school and I know that there is pressure on them not to go back... I want them to know that there are parents and students that want to be back with them and support them. I don't want them to think that they're alone and crazy for wanting to go back to school, because they're not."

A number of school districts in Colorado, as well as some local private and charter schools, have had in-person learning since late August, with no widespread outbreaks reported so far. However, Westminster High School was recently forced to close temporarily when more than 250 students were quarantined for 14-days, after three positive cases were reported in the school population. There also have been quarantines and outbreaks reported at colleges and universities statewide since campuses opened to students in August.

Fear of such widespread quarantines and concern around Colorado Department of Public Health rules around contact tracing played a part in St. Vrain's decision to start the 20-21 school year 100% online, and the SVEA is calling on the state to amend the guidelines. According to Maloit, the quarantining rule is "excessive in its expanse" and makes reopening schools "open to interpretation and ambiguous."

"The requirement to quarantine an entire cohort and all potentially interacted individuals for 14-days, regardless of negative tests, creates a situation where classroom attendance will be nearly continuously disrupted," he said. "We would like to see only the COVID-positive individual quarantine for 2-weeks, those in the actual class require a negative test only to return, and the treatment of symptoms alone as insufficient to require a mass quarantine."

Maloit wanted to be clear that the SVEA isn't trying to downplay the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and doesn't consider it a hoax. Members are strongly in favor of implementing mitigation measures in classrooms, such as masking, cohorting, and strict social distancing, and have no expectations that things will "be the same as it was in January."

They also want SVVSD to leave the online option open for families who choose it, whether for health or other reasons.

"We think that there should be priority placed on both of those education programs. This is not the time to be focusing on anything else. Everything else is secondary. It's how do we get the kids back as safely as possible, and how do we provide an effective and equitable online solution for those who can't or won't come back. That's where we need to be."

That's the message SVEA members had when they spoke during the comment portion of the St. Vrain Board of Education meeting on Sept. 9, and it's the message they hope comes through in the interviews conducted with St. Vrain families and students, and released on social media. The group is also planning to hold "distance learning in person" sessions in school parking lots in the coming weeks as a show of solidarity to teachers. Maloit said these events will be "very positive' and focused on students rather than parent complaints.

Maloit is still uncomfortable with what he characterized as "vitriol" in the wider debate, seemingly driven by polarized politics. He does his best to keep the heated rhetoric to a minimum within SVEA and the page's comment section. He stressed that the group is seeking a collaborative approach with school and county officials, and not a combative one.

"We have to be very calm and concise and show that we're willing to be collaborative. We're not mad at the teachers, we're not mad at the district, we're not mad at anybody. We're upset that our kids are hurt. We are upset that teachers aren't allowed to do what they're passionate about, and we want to support them."

Maloit is hopeful that the school board will have good news for SVEA members and supporters at the Sept. 23 board meeting, but didn't want to make a prediction. At last week's meeting, Superintendent Don Haddad suggested that the district's hybrid learning plan, which combines in-person and online instruction, could be implemented in the coming weeks, if county health benchmarks allow. While that would be a step in the right direction, Maloit and the SVEA don't expect to go away anytime soon.

"They're going to make the decision that they think is right, and hopefully, it's something that we can agree with and support, and we really want to. We're hoping it puts the kids first, and we hope it puts teachers who want to get back in the classroom and teach first. That's where we stand on that. We need something that works for the majority of people."

For more information about St. Vrain Educational Advocates, visit them on Twitter..