Explore Schools has been working diligently to prepare for the 2020-21 school year, including planning for returning to in-person instruction in the fall. The goal and purpose of our reopening plan is to enable flexibility in meeting the needs of students, families, and staff, while continuing to provide high-quality instructional opportunities in service of our mission: Providing our students with the academic skills and critical thinking abilities they need to succeed in a college-preparatory high school.

Reopening Guiding Principles

Our first step in approaching this work was to determine our guiding principles for decision making. These principles informed what we should prioritize and how we should go about problem solving for a safe return. We settled on six principles that best reflect how we are prioritizing this work.

1. Students, staff, and families feel safe and cared for: Most important to any planning is the health and safety of our students and staff. Everything detailed here takes this into account first and foremost. Our kids cannot learn if they feel in danger or are at risk of getting sick. This is the same for our staff. In order to deliver the best education possible, we must first ensure our students and staff are receiving everything they need from us to be healthy and safe.

2. Students’ basic needs are met: Meeting the needs of our families is critical to our mission. Therefore, it is critical we know and understand what our families prefer in terms of reopening and that we are able to provide students with the social and emotional supports they need to be successful in a remote or in-person setting. Every decision we make must be informed by the opinions of our families and the needs of our students.

3. Staff is retained and avoids burnout: Scheduling, to the extent possible, considers the work expectations on staff and ensures technology and external partnerships are leveraged to support staff. As a network, we’re centralizing instructional components such as planning to reduce tasks traditionally placed on teachers. Finally, teacher time will be prioritized to focus on student support, small group instruction, and remediation.

4. Resources are allocated based on what we think will have the most impact on student achievement: Our charge is to provide the best education we can. If the situation requires we do it remotely, we must do everything we can to ensure the instruction is just as high quality as if it was in-person. In our hybrid model, remote instruction days will be just as rigorous as in-person.

5. All students have access to rigorous math and ELA instructional materials: All students will have access to grade level math, and major work of the previous grade. All students will have opportunities to read rigorous, high interest grade level texts, write, and have discussions about them. Students performing significantly behind their peers academically will have access to prioritized remediation.

6. Students have access to a range of enrichment activities and opportunities to interact with staff and their peers: We know that this has been an incredibly challenging and stressful time. Our students deserve both the best instruction possible and high-quality opportunities for enrichment and engagement with staff and peers.

Using these guiding principles, we have met with and surveyed parents, teachers, and school leaders to ensure the planning meets the needs of our community. While much planning and work has gone into the plans below, this is still very much a living document that will change as we learn more and get closer to returning to our buildings. We will continue to provide opportunities for families and staff to give input and feedback on the plan. Based on what we’ve learned, we have devised a reopening plan that puts the health and safety of our students, families, and staff at the forefront.

Reopening Instructional Models

The 2020-21 school year began remotely for all students on August 26^th, with kindergarten starting on August 24^th, with the goal of beginning in-person instruction Wednesday, October 14th.

Once we are able to declare it is safe for schools to resume in-person instruction, we will begin to phase in a hybrid model for instruction: providing a combination of in-person instructional days and remote days. Families who do not wish to send their children in person will have the opportunity to sign up for a fully-remote model. Both options will provide our students with a high-quality education.

• Fully-Remote: Families have the option to choose to participate in remote-only instruction. In this option, a student will receive remote instruction that is both live and pre-recorded. Technology will be provided to families in need to accommodate remote instruction. Students can opt into the fully-remote option at any time of the year.

• Hybrid Model: When we are able to return to our buildings, the hybrid option will allow for students to attend in-person instruction with their peers a minimum of 2 days per week. Students will participate in remote instruction on the days they are not at school in person, receiving a combination of live and pre-recorded remote instruction. Technology will be provided to families in need to accommodate remote instruction.

Starting Wednesday, October 14^th, small groups of students will begin meeting in-person for orientation to hybrid learning. Over time, we will gradually increase in-person time. We will expand this phased in approach to eventually provide at least two days of in-person instruction to our families who opted for the hybrid model. However, we are also preparing for the possibility of not being able to reopen in our buildings in October. As all our schools are co-located in NYC DOE buildings, our reopening plan is contingent on the DOE’s plan for reopening. We’ve outlined our proposed phased in approach, assuming we are able to begin in-person instruction on October 14^th, below:

We have learned a lot from offering fully-remote instruction to our students since March 2020 and will expand our remote instructional offerings based on best practices and lessons learned from the previous school year. While there are still a lot of unknowns and uncertainty about when we’ll be able to return to the building—what we do know for sure is that remote learning will be a corner stone of our instructional model this year. We are building plans that will enable us to easily transition between in-person and remote instruction at any point next year.

Plan Development

Throughout our reopening plan you will see detailed health and safety measures that we have vetted with health experts from Mt. Sinai and Montefiore to ensure our protocols and procedures are rigorous, aligned to CDC and DOH guidance, and designed to keep our staff and students safe. The measures include the various schoolwide procedures that will be altered to ensure the health and safety of our students and staff. Additionally, we outline how we will respond to a potential positive case of COVID-19 in any of our schools.

We have consulted staff, parents, health experts in the field, board members, and other charter network leaders to ensure our plan meets both the guidance outlined by DOH, CDC, Board of Regents, and SUNY, and also the needs of our community. We have administered several staff & family surveys, held Q&A sessions for members of our community, and held numerous planning meetings with principals, school-based operational leaders, and school-based culture leaders. These planning meetings have been used to modify school-wide systems, develop schedules for hybrid and remote instruction, and to plan for the eventual return of students to our buildings. The planning process involved determining the protocols and procedures outlined in our 20-21 school year plans including: health and safety protocols for returning to the building, scheduling guidelines for fully-remote and hybrid models of instruction, social and emotional well-being of students, their families, and staff, training and ongoing staff development around all parts of the plan, strategies and curricular resources for addressing learning loss from the closure, and technology and resources for students and staff, including those who will be fully remote.

Following the health and safety measures, we provide details on how we are approaching the calendar and scheduling, responding to a positive COVID-19 case, and instruction and assessments. In each section, you’ll see our current thinking, based on our tentative plans to return to hybrid instruction on 10/14. This thinking is contingent on the needs of our community and is subject to change as we learn more about where staff and students are in their own comfort level with returning to the buildings. We are continuing to provide opportunities for input from parents, staff, and school leaders, in order to strengthen and improve our plan, and will continue to update our plan as we receive additional information and guidance from the state, city, NYC DOH, CDC and NYC DOE.

One final note, this document, and updated material will live on our family-facing website, here. We will continue to share updates through each of our schools’ normal means of communication as well as on our website and social media platforms. We are also planning to continue hosting Q&A sessions, administering surveys, and convening a family advisory committee to ensure the needs and wants of our families are at the center of our work. You will hear about these opportunities through your school. If you have any questions or want to learn more, please reach out to our Director of Special Projects, Jeremy Thomas, at jsthomas@explorenetwork.org.