[narrator] This episode was made possible by a grant from the Mary N. Porter Community Impact Fund of the Community Foundation of Broward and the Truist Foundation.

South Florida schools are ready to reopen, but concerns about safety still remain.

We answer those questions and more to help parents, students and teachers prepare to head back to the classroom.

Stay with us as we dive into Your South Florida.

Hi, I'm Pam Giganti.

Welcome to Your South Florida.

After more than a year of remote learning, students and teachers are returning to classrooms this fall.

But with younger students unable to get vaccinated and the Delta variant on the rise, many parents and teachers are understandably concerned, should mask wearing being mandated?

And how are schools helping students who struggled with online learning to catch up?

As part of our recent virtual town hall, I was joined by Palm Beach School superintendent, Dr. Donald Fennoy, United Way Miami-Dade's, Gladys Montes and Broward School board chair, Dr. Rosalind Osgood to help answer these questions and more to help prepare students for a new school year.

Well, there is a lot to get to this evening.

But before we begin, our Your South Florida summer intern team went out into the community to talk to parents and students about their concerns for the new school year.

Yes, I am concerned about the new Delta variant.

I think taking it like most parents are taking it, just one day at a time and see where it leads us.

My main concern is my high schooler who is going to be around a bunch of kids and they're in and out of classes all day long.

And it's definitely not as regulated as the elementary school is.

I am nervous, but for the most part excited for them to get back to school and ready for a more normal school year.

I'm just excited to go again because I really like to meet new people and learn with them.

I was mostly in the beginning I was online, but at the last semester I was like in-person.

It was very nice.

And I could have meet my friends in-person.

I'm concerned that there are variants out there.

We wanna make sure that people are safe, and especially kids are safe.

But I do feel that schools will be responsible.

And I think it's important for kids to get back with friends, to be in the community that helps them foster their learning.

The fact that they don't let us know whether or not the teachers are vaccinated is concerning because obviously we can't vaccinate our children.

So if the children are exposed to teachers that are not vaccinated then I'm concerned that my kids will bring it back to me.

I'm not vaccinated yet because I'm pregnant, but I plan to get vaccinated once my baby is born.

Well, my son is eight.

He's in second grade since the rising third grader.

He is virtual until late March of last year.

I'm happy for him to be back in school to have that one-on-one interactions you guys have for social interactions.

I work full-time as well, so it's helpful for him to be in class.

But it's really about whether or not he safe.

Well, it seems like most parents, as you saw, they're ready for some normalcy.

They wanna get their kids back into the classroom.

But as we heard, the biggest concern for parents is the Delta variant.

The latest guidance from the CDC says mask wearing is not mandatory for vaccinated students and teachers.

And most recently the American Academy of Pediatrics says that all students older than two should be masked up regardless of vaccination status.

And we know that kids can't get vaccinated until they're 12 at this point.

But as our last parents said, there's no way to tell who has been vaccinated or who has not.

Plus again, children under the age of 12 still aren't eligible for a vaccine.

So Dr. Osgood, I wanna start with you with this in mind.

What is the plan for Broward County Public Schools at this point to keep everybody safe?

Guidelines from public health experts will help us and continue to support our choices.

Right now, experts are supporting in-person instructions.

We all agree that vaccination is the best strategy for prevention.

So we encourage parents to be vaccinated and to get the children that are 12 and up vaccinated as well.

On campus, remote learning will be our only option.

We're not looking to do any type of hybrid education.

And in accordance with the recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics, face covering for all students and employees is strongly recommended.

At this time our staff is recommending that wearing mask is voluntary and not required.

Opening our schools in a fluid environment is challenging as the positively rates continue to fluctuate and have risen significantly over the past couple of weeks.

So this recommendation could change as circumstances vary.

But safety and security of our students and teachers continue to be our top priority.

Thank, you, Dr. Osgood.

Dr. Fennoy, I want you to jump in here, piggybacking on what Dr. Osgood was saying.

Talk about the plan for Palm Beach County Public Schools with the COVID cases on the rise.

Well, we keep hearing about the positivity rate going up because of the Delta variant.

We know school nurses tested students for COVID last year, are they going to do that again this year?

Kind of walk us through what it's gonna look like in Palm Beach Counties Public School starting this August.

Palm Beach County and most school districts in state of Florida we were actually open all of last year prior to the vaccine or any of this.

So the good news for us is that we've actually had practice.

And so we were able to open our schools last year on September, and we never closed not one school the entire year.

We didn't have a significant spread in any of our campuses.

Our protocols with the health department, our principals, our teachers, our families, our kids did an amazing job of following on our protocol.

So for us in Palm Beach County we decided up until this point again, as my colleagues said from Broward County, everything is subject to change.

But as of today I made the decision prior back in June that we would have mask optionals in our buildings, that we would be as normal as we could pre-COVID.

However, we still will have a place.

Social distancing, where applicable again, when you're bringing all of the students back, some of those three and six feet social distancing protocols we have in place may not be applicable, especially in the secondary schools, but we will continue to work through that.

We have purchased electrostatics sprayers for all of our campuses and buses.

Wipes and masks are available for those who want them.

Our air filtration systems have been upgraded where applicable to May 13.

And we're looking at some other mitigating factors as well.

Our environmental services team, our contractors are ready to do deep clean when necessary.

But honestly, our goal is try to have as normal of the year as possible.

I mean, we are definitely concerned about monitoring the realities of the Delta variant.

But again, as of today, it is still an optional.

It is still mask optional for our parents and kids coming back into the buildings in August.

And Gladys, I wanna bring you into the conversation.

Let's talk about the little kids.

Let's remind everyone that you work for United Way Miami-Dade Center for Excellence and the Demonstration School.

You work with the little guys all the way up to getting ready for kindergarten.

So probably about five years old, more or less.

What are the plans to keep them safe and to help them get ready for going into kindergarten?

Well, like Dr. Osgood and Dr. Fennoy, we're going to continue to watch the children and make sure that all of the policies and procedures that we have in place are there to keep them safe.

We are going in, like everybody says, this is something that is very fluid.

We need to be watching what the CDC is always telling us and what the counties, the recommendations are when it comes to childcare facilities and how we operate during the pandemic.

We know that the pandemic is not done like some people think.

We're still having a lot of things to consider, such as the drop-off and the pick-up of the children.

In most of the centers parents were used to go inside the classrooms.

We're still not allowing adults inside the classroom because we want to limit the numbers of adults that are exchanging with the children.

We have that population that it's not yet going to be vaccinated.

And in that not all the time they can wear a mask.

Only children older than two year old are going to be able to wear a mask, the other ones are on mask.

So everybody in our building is going to continue to wear a mask.

For us, it's not gonna be an optional possibility.

We're going to be covered because we want to protect ourselves and we want to protect the children.

We'll continue to use a lot of sanitation in our facilities.

Babies are and tellers they get things in their mouth and then they put them down.

So there's a lot of rigor in the way that we need to be cleaning after them and making sure that everything is okay.

The vaccination of our staff is very, very important, and we encourage each and every one of those that are working with children to be vaccinated.

But again, like the parent in the interview was saying, they might be teachers that are not vaccinated.

And for that reason, we're all going to be wearing mask.

We have to use the plexiglass to divide the tables where the children are eating because children move from their plate to the plate of the friend.

And so we need to keep them safe by using separators in every one of the tables where they are working.

So we will continue temperature-taking.

We will continue with that.

The station of adults that are bringing children into the program.

So we can ensure that everybody is following healthy guidelines.

All right, let's pivot a little bit here and talk about our teachers.

As we all know, they were thrown into a new digital world at the start of remote learning, working tirelessly to keep students on track.

Earlier, we spoke with United Teachers of Dade President, Karla Hernandez-Mats, to hear more about the concerns of teachers and their hopes for the new school year.

This was by far the hardest year in all of our careers.

Learning to teach in this modality in a virtual world really created some ingenuity.

I mean, teachers had to really think outside the box on how to interact with students.

And we did see some veteran, all-star fantastic teachers regretfully have to retire probably sooner than they intended.

But at the same time, we know that they did what was right, what they needed for themselves and for their families.

And we were glad that we were able to support them in any way that we could.

But resilience is definitely the key word for this last school year.

I think that parents have a new sense of respect for our educators because they have been in the classroom.

They've had a very open window to see exactly what's happening in the teacher's classroom and how they interact with students during this time.

But I also think that for teachers it's been difficult because some of the concerns that we've had on our end is trying to figure out how to get children connected, do they have the adequate support system at home?

do they have parents that could follow up with assignments and things that they were doing?

But also the social, emotional learning aspect of it.

We saw so many children that were devastated because of personal loss.

They lost grandparents, they lost family members.

Some parents lost their jobs.

And so the financial hardships of what the pandemic meant or how it impacted their lives was something that was truly traumatizing for the child and very worrisome for the teacher.

The educators were trying to figure out how to get the resources, making sure that they came to school to get their free lunch and breakfast.

And all those things are things that we're always worried about.

We've thought about what it meant for children academically as well.

This has turned into another educational gap, which is we're calling it the COVID gap.

We usually just talk about the summer slide, but now this is something that's really impacted children worldwide.

We know that there are certain things that will continue to be part of our classrooms.

We need to continue to keep our social distancing, our spacing between our desks.

The CDC recommends that certain things continue to be in place in the classrooms.

And because it's become politicized, I'm really concerned over mask wearing as well.

We don't know which children are vaccinated, the older ones, which ones are not as well as teachers.

And when you have a set of students that are wearing a mask and a set of students that are not, will that cause any tension or friction, even amongst students.

Is there gonna be bullying because some kids are wearing masks and some kids are not wearing masks.

And all these things are aspects that we have to consider, we have to talk about.

And we have to make sure that our students are safe so we're gonna continue to watch what the positivity rates are locally.

And we hope and pray that people are getting vaccinated, and that all those that are eligible continue to get vaccinated as well.

I definitely think that the future of education is going to look and feel vastly different.

I think that this crisis made us look at education differently and see that different children learn in different ways, and that we can reach children in different ways as well.

I just hope that every child and every of my colleagues everywhere has a fantastic year.

I mean, we miss seeing each other, we miss being in-person.

And I can't wait for our students to be back, of course, as long as everything is safe, as long as we can protect them and make sure that everyone is healthy within our school sites and our classrooms.

But at the end of the day, we just want everybody to continue to learn, to be happy, to be healthy.

Because of course, if you're happy and you're healthy, then you can learn.

And we want all of our children to be learning and be with us next year.

All right, and then Dr. Fennoy, I wanna go back to you.

Let's talk a little bit about what we saw in that piece with Karla Hernandez-Mats.

And we talked about teachers and how some of those teachers were struggling on many levels with technology.

Also, maybe from just being able to peek inside the home of a student.

We were all on either Teams or Zoom, and you could see that maybe a child was struggling.

So talk about what you are hearing from the teachers and their concerns as we get prepared to go into school in August.

Well, I mean, the teacher's concerns are the same.

I mean, I think as last year there's so much uncertainty, but as it relates to the students, again, we were very proactive upon me.

So we didn't have any of the technology issues.

Other districts has, so we did a lot of pre-work and build an infrastructure to make that work.

We had many, many teachers that were our ambassadors that were able to help other teachers transition to this new modality of learning.

I think the great news, though, for us is that when the test coordinator came out in Palm Beach we didn't lose any ground.

We were able to kind of maintain in the sort of our ultimate environment.

So that's really good news and a testament to how strong our teachers were.

But I do believe that a lot of teachers are still worried about the realities of the COVID slide, the loss, how this is gonna impact them financially, as it relates to on how they're compensated sometimes, tied to test scores.

I think, a lot of last year we were able to ease into larger classrooms.

By the time we closed school we were hovering close to 70% of all of our students inside of buildings.

We'll start the year, probably greater than 70% as most parents indicating that they will bring their kids back to schools.

But again, our teachers they're fantastic.

And so I'm just excited about the possibilities of us moving forward.

But we're taking all the precautions and our teachers are actually at the table with us in a lot of the decision-making, so it really plays out well for us in Palm Beach County.

And we also heard Karla Hernandez-Mats talked about, again, that unique vantage point that teachers had last year, being able to literally see inside a student's home.

A lot of them were dealing with loss, loss from COVID, parents lost their jobs.

So students and families are gonna continue to need that emotional and mental health support.

So Dr. Osgood, talk about that and what the district is doing to help support families and teachers when it comes to emotional and mental health.

In Broward County we have tremendously changed our strategies for student support services under the phenomenal leadership of superintendent, Robert Runcie.

So we have a whole division that's dedicated to student support services, where we have had social workers in a lot of our schools before the pandemic.

And we continue to provide the wrap around services to those students that need the emotional support, as well as our homeless students.

And having the social workers give you a great understanding of the home environment and the things that are needed.

In Broward County we have a phenomenal continuum of care.

Well, we have a lot of partnerships with community-based organizations that come along with us as partners and help extend our arms by providing those support services and the different things that our family needs.

We have a partnership with the Broward Behavioral Health Coalition, which is a entity in Broward County that focus on mental health for both adults and for children.

So we're looking to continue that partnership.

We also, the board has voted to use a lot of the dollars that we got through ESSA and through different funding streams during this time to add family therapist to some of our schools, to increase the number of year employing to make sure that we are strategically leveling up in those areas of supports for our students.

We've also fully funded our peer mentoring program, our Mentoring Tomorrow's Leaders that to knows and actions.

To provide those kinds of peer supports for our students, that they will be able to strengthen love and care for each other.

But I think that it has to be said that it's not just an issue for school systems.

School districts have to address a lot of issues, and we have some phenomenal people that work in education that come up with strategies to do that.

But as communities, we have to prioritize the education and the mental health of our children.

And we have to work in tandem with our school systems.

Our school systems are the institution that handles more children than any other institution in our community.

And a lot of times our community services and dollars that are supporting kids in the community are not in alignment, are not in extension of what's going on in the school system.

Dr. Osgood, thank you so much.

And Gladys, I wanna bring you into this conversation.

And Dr. Osgood talked about community and how important community is.

Community is such an important part about what you do at United Way.

So let's talk about these early learners, the children in pre-K, the kids getting ready to go to kindergarten.

This gonna be their first time a lot of them being in a classroom.

So talk about the impacts- Yes.

That remote learning has had on them and also the emotional and behavioral development of these young students, and how their parents can help them get prepared.

So one of the things that it's happening in the community of Early Care and Education is the reductions of centers that are going to be able to service our families because now they were closed, there was no income during the time that people were at home and not going to work.

And all of the steps that we're trying to put forward to help and assist the Center so they can go back in their field and they can provide services.

For children in school it's a little bit easy to go and move to virtual programs, which is what we had to do when we close our doors.

For children's zero to five, for so many years we have been working on trying to limit the time that these children were in front of a screen.

And all of a sudden that was a solution to the issues that we had.

And because these children are not independent, they needed an adult right by them.

And we needed to control the amount of time that they were in front of a screen because they were going to be there for 50 minutes and then done.

They don't wanna hear about anything else, they wanna go and play.

So for teachers it was a very traumatic kind of situation.

The fact that not only did they have to change the mode in which they were teaching, but that they needed to limit the time that they were in contact with the children.

It's so important that we make teachers be responsive to the needs of the children.

That children have this adult close to them.

So the intervention using the videos, and using the Zooms, and all of the things that we had, all of them platforms we have to use was mostly to make sure that there was a contact.

Because the time when children are learning in between the ages of zero to five is when they are experiencing some sort of activity or event.

And that was really not happening.

We're talking about a lot of disequilibrium in the life of our families and the children lacked a lot of that social, emotional and experience that they have at the Center.

And they are basic for children when they enter kindergarten.

So we are sending children to kindergarten that did not have stable routines, which is a way where children are learning.

And that is worrisome for us and worrisome for those kindergarten teachers that are receiving the children.

That they were not utilizing the tools that usually they're going to be exposed when they enter the kindergarten.

I think that we are going to see children who are going to show some delay in their social emotional area because they have not been able to be exposed to those experiences.

So we're going to have to work on that.

And let's talk about the learning losses from last year, that COVID gap that Karla referred to it as.

We saw districts offer enhanced and extended summer programs to help students ahead of the new school year.

So Dr. Fennoy, talk about some of those plans that have been in place in Palm Beach County to help those kids who maybe had some learning loss and are trying to catch up so that they can be better prepared by the time August starts.

Yeah, our chief academic officer and deputy superintendent, Keith Oswald acceleration plan is what we called it.

And so that has been into effect.

We started several weeks ago back in June.

So our summer schools have been happening with all of our recovery efforts.

I think also there'll be clear, our teachers and our principals we're looking at the data that we received from the standardized testing that we were able to complete last year.

And making sure that the schedules are all aligned, and making sure that they're reaching out and creating plans for those students that have fallen behind.

I think on the social emotional piece Palm Beach County was very fortunate.

Several years ago I asked the community to pass a referendum that allowed us tax dollars in order to put mental health workers in every school.

One in Palm Beach County in addition to the social workers and counselors.

And we were able to create a mental behavioral health response team, both one for the district and one for our police department.

So understanding that we have to take care of all of the adults and all the kids.

And so post park and we were able to create an entire division of equity and student wellness.

And so that is great for us.

And so we have a lot of practice in that and we're really excited.

But on the learning loss, again, we were able to not lose a lot in terms of test scores, but we'd realize there are other factors that have to be, just the socialization pieces.

I conducted all of our graduations, our 32 graduations and it was clear.

And a lot of our kids don't know each other.

They've created a whole new social network.

And so I think this sort of acclimation period getting back into proximity with others for a lot of kids it's gonna require a lot of support.

And so we're ready and willing to make sure that we provide all the necessary services for them and their families as they transition back into a much more normal environment.

And Dr. Osgood, talk to us about what the plan is for Broward County Public Schools to help those students that fell behind.

What has the district been doing to help them kind of breach that COVID gap that we're talking about?

We have the same process that Dr. Fennoy talked about.

Mr. Runcie has put something in place to focus on accelerating our students and not putting them in some of negative remedial situation.

We'll also use an ESSA funds to have extra teachers at schools to help students.

We have been doing this very fabulous pilot project with the Broward Community Foundation it's called school is cool where the foundation has funded extra teacher in the class where we have kids that are on grade level with one teacher and kids that are not on grade levels with another teacher to allow the students to get ample time with the teacher.

And it has worked very, very well.

I know in my district in district five, so we're expanding that with ESSA funds and working to model that.

We've looked at our data to see where we need to focus and help kids.

We implemented one of the most phenomenal summer school programs that Broward County Public Schools have ever seen, the largest where we have a lot of students in school.

And we're doing it as an approach to providing them with a parent with a whole day of a student from before school camp, to the education time, to after school camp, where it's a whole day of learning and fun.

Providing those opportunities for parents that need to get back to work, parents that have opportunities perhaps to start their second jobs to do so.

I want to just say, as we're having this conversation, as we experienced COVID our teachers have been STeLLA, they've been phenomenal, they pivoted on the drop of a dime.

But we've had cafeteria workers that never stopped working, janitors and custodians that work even during the times at schools were set down.

A lot of them were passing out food, feeding children.

We've had bus drivers, we've had administrators.

This has just been all hands on deck for those that work in this space of education in any capacity.

This has been a horrific year for us.

And those of us that are in districts where we've experienced tragedies like Stoneman Douglas, or just having students that we've lost to suicide and other things, it has been rough.

We have actually implemented mindfulness all throughout our district where every day there is two minutes of mindfulness at the start in every class.

And as the chair of the school board right now, I have implemented with the school board.

And I'm saying that, so that those that are listening and that my colleagues will also just be mindful that we have to pause a moment to take care of our own mental health, take the time for our family, this heavy lifting and education.

And a lot of times you're expected to just serve, serve, serve.

But if we're gonna sustain ourselves and be as healthy as we can be, to receive our children when they come back, we have to make sure that we're taking care of our own mental health and our own social, emotional well-being as well.

As well as giving the attention that's needed to our families.

You can watch the full town hall on our Facebook page @YourSouthFL.

Have a great school year.

And thanks for watching.