By Pepper Fisher
SEQUIM – Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal was a guest speaker at the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday.
Joining the group virtually, Reykdal in his opening statements gave praise to local district officials and educators for their successes over the past year.
“There’s a lot of folks who see new variants of the virus coming and they see that we don’t have everyone vaccinated and they wonder when kids are going to get vaccinated. So, we’ve got these headline challenges now that sort of have some people still believing that until all those things are in place, we really shouldn’t open schools in person. But I’m going to reiterate once again, it is safe to open our schools in person. We’re doing it all over the state and I’m super grateful for the district’s up in your area that have followed that and opened. They’ve done it successfully and just tremendous leadership up there. And a huge shout out to all of our educators who go through this with real anxiety. This is still hard to do.”
Reykdal also talked about 2 big changes that he expects to see in the near future for some districts. The first is a move to take what they’ve learned from remote learning and offer it to families on a permanent basis.
“We just learned how to teach remotely. It wasn’t great for a lot of kids. But for some, they really thrived. And for some of their families, they like that. You’re going to see more districts retain a portion of that in their model, or they’re going to say, ‘We’re going to forever have a remote learning model for the families that want it’, or you’re going to see regional models where they say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t make sense for all of the schools on the peninsula to have that, but we should have a better regional model’. And that doesn’t take any more studies. It doesn’t take a pilot change. It just takes the will.”
The second thing he anticipates is a move to expand school calendars for a shorter summer break.
“If you believe kids lost out on learning the last eight or nine months, and I think many did, why do we keep tolerating all the slippage every summer for 13 years? We take an 11-week break for 13 years effectively, you know, move four steps forward in a school year and take a step backwards. So coming out of this, you’re going to see some grant dollars from us trying to encourage districts to, what we call, rebalance their calendar. We see this all over Asia and Europe. They don’t take the 11-week summer. It’s maybe six or seven weeks. And they take longer breaks throughout the year. And just that simple fact reduces summer learning loss or what we call ‘summer slide’, and over time that accumulates to higher achievement for kids.”
(Photo: reykdal.org)