June 2020
W E AT H E R
30 TUESDAY
PARTLY CLOUDY
40 % STORMS
PARTLY CLOUDY
TODAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
94/78
95/79
97/75
by LEGEND o you ght t Brou PLUMBING & ROOTER
LIC# ML16126
830.303.3335
The Voice of Seguin Today
Volume 55, Number 124
830-379-2234
Seguin ISD offers survey on reopening of schools By Darren Dunn and Cindy Aguirre-Herrera
(Seguin) -- The Seguin ISD wants hear your thoughts about the upcoming school year. The district is asking the public to take an online survey. Staff, parents and community members are all invited to take the survey that focuses on the reopening of local schools. Seguin ISD Superintendent Matthew Gutierrez says it's important that they get this input, so that they can make an informed decision about how best to start the new school year.
learning and teachers that will focus more on face to face certain percentage of students that come on Monday, so getting that feedback is really critical right now,” said Wednesday and another group of students come on Gutierrez. Tuesday, Thursday and while they are on home on the two other days, they are engaged in remote learning so that is Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath was expected still a possibility but right now, what has been to announce this week his official plan for reopening Texas communicated with school districts is the face to face public schools, but that was postpoined last week after the learning or the remote learning. It is our hope that we can have a hybrid model that we can look at so that we can get as many of our kids in our classrooms engaged in that face to face learning,” said Gutierrez. Districts all across the state are sort of at the mercy of the pandemic. They are all making plans for the new school year, but there are a number of unknown factors, like will health officials deem it safe enough for face-to-face teaching to resume. Dr. Gutierrez says that's why it's important that they keep parents, staff and the community engaged in this process as they work to finalize plans for the new school year.
“We want to get a sense of where our stakeholders are, so that we can begin outlying plans for that reopening of school. Now, the Texas Education Agency announced that there were going to be two options, and know that this could change, but there are going to be two options -students returning to school to their classrooms with teachers learning face-to-face, or the option of parents opting to keep their children at home engaged in remote learning,” said Gutierrez. With the spread of COVID-19 continuing, Dr. Gutierrez says he knows some parents might be concerned about how schools will look when they are scheduled to reopen in governor announced that the number of positive COVIDAugust. He says this is an opportunity for parents to have 19 tests was surging around much of the state. their voices heard. Dr. Gutierrez says there are a number of options being “With the survey and this is where it’s really important for considered. He says the state my consider a method that parents to complete the survey, is we are trying to get a allows districts to have some flexibility when it comes to good understanding of how they feel about their children how they handle the return of students and staff during the coming back to school so that we can gauge what fall semester. percentage of students would likely return to our classrooms and what percentage of students would opt to “They’re still in conversations about the possibility of the learn remotely so that we can begin staffing accordingly in hybrid model where you have a certain percentage of identifying which teachers would focus more on the virtual students that come to school like an A, B, C schedule – a
B.J. Jeffers 830-560-0057
“We see things change so fast. We are going to get feedback now but there’s a very high probability that we are going to have to conduct another survey at the end of July or the beginning of August to gauge how people are feeling then because we could be in a very different position with this virus four weeks from now. We could see it level off. We could see significant decreases and that will change people’s perceptions and so it’s important for us to gauge where people are right now as people are starting to think about school starting in a couple of months but it’s going to be really important as we get close to that first day of school,” said Gutierrez. The deadline to complete the survey is Wednesday, July 1. The survey, which is available in both English and Spanish, can be accessed via the district's Facebook page. You can also use the following link for the English version , and this link for the Spanish language version.