Parents and teachers pose for a photo during a rally outside the Davis School District offices in Farmington prior to a school board meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020. Parents and students held signs and voiced their support for an in person five day school week. Photo: Steve Griffin, Deseret News
FARMINGTON, Utah — The Davis School District is doing a hybrid model of classes this semester, with students alternating between on-campus and online classes.
The goal is to protect vulnerable students and staff from COVID-19 by making it easier to practice social distancing. But the plan is drawing criticism from many parents, who believe kids should be in class full time.
That’s why they packed the Davis School District’s board meeting to beg the board to have all classes happen on campus.
Parents like Mike Brown think their kids’ needs are not being considered. He believes children have a very low risk of getting a serious case of COVID-19, and he told the board they should not have interfered with individual schools’s plans to reopen.
“You are denying science. You don’t care about mental health. You don’t care about jerking our kids around three weeks before opening school,” Brown said.
Brittany Fine believes kids who have special needs like hers will be at a disadvantage, as they will only see their teachers in person nine days that year.
“I don’t know about a typical child, but [is] that a free and appropriate education? I can for sure promise you, for a child with a learning disability, that is not a free and appropriate education,” Fine said.
The district says they based their back-to-school plan on a survey sent to parents.
But Coby Perser thinks it did not give them enough choices.
“The problem with that survey is, it basically asks me, as a parent, what pinky I want to lose? My right or my left? It didn’t ask me if I wanted to lose a pinky. It didn’t ask me if my kids would come back to school five days a week,” Perser said.
About 100 Davis District parents held a rally to support all on-campus classes ahead of the meeting.
Others, however, spoke in support of the district’s plans.
The Davis School District will call an emergency meeting soon to review the back-to-school plan.
With 73,000 students, the Davis School District is the second-largest in the state. Roughly 5,000 of those students signed up for online-only learning, with the rest planning to attend classes on-campus in Davis schools as much as possible.