Harlem students return to school this week

Editor’s note: Harlem schools were not able to provide an interview in time to be included in a back-to-school special section inserted in today’s edition. Look to the special section for more on other areas schools return to the classroom.

As schools all across north-central Montana return to session with the start of the 2021-22 school year, Harlem Public Schools Superintendent Arlene Bigby said last year had plenty of challenges to learn from, and many of the lessons learned will be applied in the school system this school year.

Harlem schools are scheduled to return to class this week with no remote learning, she said, but they will continue to utilize technology tools and strategies based on last year’s experiences to offer students more and better opportunities for learning.

And they will continue to watch the situation as the year progresses.

“We will continue to monitor our plan and be ready to adjust as needed to keep our students safe,” Bigby said.

“There were many changes throughout the district,” Bigby said, “some include the wearing of masks, social distancing, separation of grade levels, contact tracing, scheduled bathroom breaks, cleaning and sanitizing more frequently.

“We are revisiting our re-opening plan and will implement some of last year’s changes,” she added, including requiring “staff/students to wear masks in all District buildings, follow distancing recommendations, and continue with the cleaning routines developed last year.”

Last year, in compliance with COVID-19 recommendations from Blaine County Health Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the district broke its classes into three groups, Bigby said. Group A attended school in person Mondays and Tuesdays and online Wednesdays and Thursday’s, group B had the opposite schedule, and group C attended remotely only. For the remote students, K-3 students were provided paper packets and students in grades 4-12 received Chromebooks, which were fully distributed in October.

Close to Christmas break, Bigby added, groups A and B were able to combine, but the district continued the online learning with group C. Some of the online-only students were part of a large population of students attending Harlem Schools who live on Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, where residents were asked to follow stricter stay-at-home guidelines from the tribal council.

“It was especially difficult not having all of our students in our buildings. Overall, staff and students did their best with what was provided to us,” Bigby said, adding that “teachers and staff stepped up to the challenge of educating students however they were learning and adjustments were made throughout the process to make things work better.”

All students were provided meals throughout the school year, and the district addressed lost instructional time by offering summer credit retrieval courses, she said, for any students needing extra assistance or credits in a subject — at the high school and in summer camps at the grade school.

Bigby said that the most challenging part of the last school year was making decisions that were not going to make everyone happy, but those decisions were based on specific criteria.

“We must try to make a decision that is best for the students while also being safe for them, their families, and the community,” she said.

“Teachers, students, and families all had to learn to work in a different way,” she added. “Everyone became more proficient is using technology to support learning. Teachers worked hard to help their students succeed, no matter which learning mode they were using.”