(MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. / The Journal) — The Mount Vernon City School District (MVCSD) has adapted, like many other schools and school districts nationwide and around the world, to the uncertainties from the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic. That uncertainty has already even happened before the halfway point of the first marking period, with the District postponing the start of hybrid learning and much more. In a normal year, school would have started in the days just after Labor Day weekend, but that date was pushed back slightly to Thursday, September 10th for student orientations, with official work starting on Monday, September 14th. On top of that, just days later, MVCSD Superintendent Dr. Kenneth R. Hamilton and Deputy Superintendent Dr. Jeff Gorman delivered the news to more than 7,000 students, their families, and 1,500 employees district-wide that the planned re-opening of school buildings to hybrid learning (in-person Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday, with all students off or remote with a shortened schedule Wednesday) on Monday, October 5th was postponed in favor of a phased reopening in November and December, meaning that all of the first marking period would take place virtually.
The STEAM Academy has still gone ahead with most aspects of a student's day, albeit virtually of course. Every class now has a Zoom session, homeroom announcements are recorded, and even electives and extracurriculars are thriving somewhat online. And while students, teachers, and faculty still express sadness that they're not seeing each other like usual, they're finding and cherishing those good moments.
That fun journey doesn't come without a few — scratch that, many — bumps, though. In some instances, teachers could access their Zoom sessions but students were accidentally blocked out or teachers forgot that they were muted or couldn't bypass a technical glitch. There were also reports of service outages affecting some specific students or even the whole District's operations; Schoology, the online platform used by the MVCSD, crashed nationwide at least three times (Thursday, Oct. 1, Wednesday, Oct. 7, Friday, Oct. 10) in this year according to its status history page. Those interruptions were expected at some point by some students and teachers, who said it was "just waiting to happen"; the platform had crashed multiple times in the spring, especially with incidents only days apart during the remainder of the 2019-2020 year in remote learning.
Existing technology notwithstanding, there was also a problem acquiring more technology in the MVCSD's supply. In the spring as well as over the summer, District leadership and the elected Board of Education worked with their partners at Dell and HP to make sure that they would be equipped with enough laptops for the then-upcoming 2020-2021 year. They set up a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation to raise public funding be able to pay for the laptops, continued their work with Sprint's 1MillionProject (which has since been taken over by T-Mobile, but is currently unclear what the merger means for the program) to provide free wireless communications and wi-fi hotspots to students, and has worked with local and regional internet providers Altice USA / Optimum, Spectrum, and Comcast / Xfinity to provide free or low-cost internet installation as well as free access at thousands of outdoor public community hotspots in Mount Vernon and the greater New York City area as part of the CableWifi network consortium. The STEAM Academy in particular has been a hub for the MVCSD technology and buildings and grounds departments, with laptop distributions being coordinated from there and specific school furniture for buildings across the District being stored in extra classrooms as well as the emptied cafeteria.
Despite the massive undertaking by Superintendent Hamilton, his administration, and the Board before the pandemic to modernize the District and their current efforts to strengthen it for the city's modern future, students, teachers, and faculty can all still agree that Mount Vernon is behind than its fellow municipalities in Westchester County, the greater NYC area, and all of New York State. The city is home to a large population of Caribbean and Hispanic immigrants as many essential workers who commute to NYC in the Bronx or Manhattan daily, which likely were contributing factors to the rapid rise of COVID-19 positive cases during the main outbreak in the spring that affected the entire New York / New Jersey / Connecticut region. 97% of students on average qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches and the cost was subsidized by the District a few years back when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food & Nutrition Service (FNS) placed the MVCSD under the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP).
The District and its food vendor, Whitsons Culinary Group (whom The Journal had covered in-depth in an investigation last year), had already rolled out the Grab & Go meal program in the first few weeks of the extended closure in the spring, starting from March, but it was complex and was not flexible enough for many, with specific zones (based on which schools students attended) for families to get their bagged breakfasts and lunches all at once, only open from 9:00–10:30am Monday to Friday. Questions and complaints soon arose from parents about if they had multiple children attending different schools in the MVCSD. This plan was reworked for this 2020-2021 school year, with a longer length of time to be able to visit a school building to pick up food (7:00am–12:15pm) and the permission to visit the school building closest to the family's residence not based on which schools students attended. The program also increased Grab & Go pick-up points, from four in the spring (Hamilton, Graham, Traphagen, & Benjamin Turner MS) to all 13 school buildings in the District. They also educated families on local organizations offering assistance with the help of their Parent & Homeless Liaisons stationed to every school, including the 211 Community Helpline from the United Way of Westchester & Putnam, the Feeding Westchester food bank and their Kraft Mobile Food Pantry and county-wide distribution events, and local mental health and support services, including the non-profit WJCS (Westchester Jewish Community Services) organization.
Going back to the CEP designation by USDA FNS, however, The Journal has recently learned that according to the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, every student in the MVCSD (attending a public school building in Mount Vernon, to be specific) is receiving a Pandemic — Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT) card with funds for every day that school buildings were closed to be used to buy food. This process is automatically done by the State without any effort done by students' families; since the District is designated as CEP, and if they are not already enrolled in the State EBT program, they will be receiving their new P-EBT cards specifically with students' names and privacy safeguards on them in the mail addressed from the Westchester County Department of Social Services, along with the information of what is the P-EBT program. The USDA, under federal Secretary of Agriculture Mr. Sonny Perdue, approved New York State's plan, which currently accounts that MVCSD students receive a total of $420 in funds (because the closure lasted from mid-March until June) per student, which may be pooled together if there are multiple public school students in the same family household. The P-EBT program is an offshoot of the standard EBT, to provide financial assistance for families to buy food in place of the regular nutrition that students may normally have gotten from school meals due to the extended closure. EBT is accepted at many supermarkets, convenience stores, and bodegas throughout Mount Vernon and New York state.
What are the questions many are asking now? Well, as seen by school districts and private schools that have reopened here in our region and nationwide, many of them had to re-close due to positive COVID-19 test results, which could have spread infection. Teachers and faculty have been allowed to come back in small cohorts on alternating days, to adhere to social distancing and capacity guidelines, and many are wondering if the November and December "target dates" will actually be safe for reopening the buildings with students again. The results of a family survey sent out before September were looked at and have been promised to be honored, but the shift to October and now later, has been because not many have taken it yet and decided on an option whether to stay remote for the first semester (halfway point of the year) or to select hybrid learning. Superintendent Hamilton said himself during previous Board meetings and public Q&A sessions that he was scared as a parent, but had no choice to open schools in his role as a school administrator, due to the authority of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Department of Education. He has frequently said that "the community has been divided" and "not everyone will be pleased" on the District's plans. As of now, the School COVID-19 Report Card from the State Department of Health has listed a laboratory estimate of two positive cases in children aged five to 17 in the geographic area of the MVCSD, while the official data as provided by the District as well as the Amani Public Charter School, and the catholic Archdiocese of New York's Our Lady of Victory School (next to Our Lady of Victory Parish) and the Montfort Academy high school (next to Saints Peter and Paul and Saint Ursula Parish), does not show that any student positives have come from their school buildings since starting the year.
Comments