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So I took a little trip last week for @StateImpactOK and @npr_ed to the crossroads of America: El Reno, Oklahoma. What follows is a kinda long thread. (1/13)
I was there to visit @elrenops at the invitation of @mcvay51. The goal: see how in-person learning is going in an Oklahoma school district. I was given the best access I've been granted during the pandemic and got to see everything good/bad/ugly. (2/13)
Mask wearing at El Reno High School is mandated. Students are mostly in compliance. Were there slip ups in the three hours I was there? Sure, I saw a few noses. But overall much better mask wearing than you see at Walmart. (3/13)
Social distancing is really hard. Here's a peek inside a sophomore English class. You can't really tell how big the room is, but students spaced where they could. (4/13)
An aside, this is why Gov. Stitt's school quarantine policy that @NuriaMKeel wrote about in today's Oklahoman likely doesn't require social distancing. I highly doubt there's a school in Oklahoma that could perfectly social distance. (5/13) https://oklahoman.com/article/5681453/controversial-quarantine-policy-being-adopted-by-some-rural-oklahoma-schools
(El Reno doesn't follow Stitt's guidance. The specific reasoning, per district officials, is they follow CDC's guidelines for quarantining. Stitt's new rules don't.) (6/13)
I visited the lunchroom. El Reno has an open campus so it wasn't too crowded. But tables were spaced six feet apart and no more than two people were allowed per table. The principal was serving lunch because several child nutrition workers were out on quarantine. (7/13)
Friends who ate together also had classes together. Pat Litiker, El Reno's COVID czar, told me friends were scheduled to take classes together whenever possible and there was a deliberate attempt to make pods of students. (8/13)
I also visited an elementary school. There the division into pods was even more evident. In their lunchroom (that I didn't get a pic of for some stupid reason) classes were eating together at separate tables that I'd guess were about 15 feet apart. (9/13)
That separation extended beyond the lunchroom. Recesses were separate and students were really only interacting with other kids/teachers in their own classrooms. Here, mask wearing might have been even better than it was at the high school TBH. (10/13)
It hasn't been perfect. El Reno has approximately 2,800 students and has had approximately 1,800 quarantines since last fall. That's led to headaches, chaos and difficulties. Staff shortages have forced pivots to distance learning several times. (11/13)
But, per Litiker, less than 1% of those 226 cases have come from in school transmission. A stark reminder that COVID is raging outside schools and presents risks to everyone in a community. (12/13)
So with all this considered, would El Reno have done it differently? Not at all, according to Liticker. It's been exhausting, of course. This is a pandemic. Bottomline, students seem to be doing better in school. (13/13)
Anyways, look out for a story about this trip soon. (14/13)
