With Lahaina schools set to reopen in about two weeks, Stefanie Hegrenes said her two youngest children are ready for a semblance of normalcy and eager to return to their friends and extracurricular activities on campus.

But she’s not sure she’s ready to pull them out of the distance learning program they began attending along with hundreds of other children after the deadly Aug. 8 fire that left much of their town in ruins. One school — King Kamehameha III Elementary — was destroyed beyond repair, while the other three temporarily closed for repair and cleanup efforts.

In the coming days, Hegrenes hopes to see for herself if the three Lahaina schools set to reopen over three days beginning Oct. 16 have clean air and safe water. State education and health officials have repeatedly assured the public that extensive air, drinking water and soil quality testing at the schools .

“As a parent, I just want to make absolutely sure that my kids are going back to a safe environment,” Hegrenes said.

As concerns about schools’ reopening abound, Lahaina families continue to seek alternatives even as the DOE scales back its distance learning options. A waitlist for the , which provides in-person support for children taking online classes, suggests that demand remains high.

Distance Learning Hub To Close But Program Continues

The DOE plans to close the hub on Thursday, although the state distance learning program will remain open for families. The department is assessing families’ future plans before making staffing decisions, said Teri Ushijima, assistant superintendent for the DOE’s office of curriculum and instructional design.

Demand for distance learning spiked in late August and early September, with the DOE’s program increasing by approximately 500 Maui students as some parents sought alternatives to enrolling their children in schools elsewhere on the island that took in many of the displaced students. For comparison, the distance learning program currently enrolls 192 students elsewhere in the state, Ushijima said.

Many displaced families went from emergency shelters to federally funded hotel rooms and had lost their cars, making distance learning an attractive option. The state DOE also provided Chromebooks to students in the distance learning program and hotspots to families with connectivity issues.

The state’s learning hub at Citizen Church has served more than 350 additional Maui students, who are counted separately from those completing their classes entirely online, according to DOE spokeswoman Nanea Kalani. 

At the peak of families’ interest in distance learning, students enrolling in the program had to wait for three to four weeks to start their programs as the DOE ordered 400 more Chromebooks and assigned Lahaina educators to online classes, Ushijima said.

Hegrenes signed her two youngest children — a sixth and an eighth grader — up for the program at the end of August, but they ended up on a waitlist. With no indication how long they would have to wait, Hegrenes bought every homeschooling book she could find and set her children to completing activities via . 

She added that, during those two weeks of uncertainty, she briefly thought about moving her family to her home state of Minnesota, where the school year wouldn’t start until early September. 

Although the online application for Maui families to enroll in distance learning states that the program still has a waitlist, Ushijima said this information is incorrect. The department no longer has a waitlist, although it takes around five days for students to receive their Chromebooks and start their remote classes, Ushijima added. 

The distance learning hub in West Maui, however, currently has 58 students on its waitlist, Kalani said. 

Mindi Cherry is one of 18 Lahaina teachers temporarily reassigned to the state’s distance learning program. 

Cherry, who had been a first-grade teacher at King Kamehameha III Elementary, currently co-teaches an online kindergarten class consisting of four Lahaina students. Her daughter, a seventh grader originally enrolled at Lahaina Intermediate, also takes online classes as part of the DOE’s distance learning program.

As both a parent and teacher, Cherry said she understands the benefits of distance learning, adding that the flexibility of online classes provided her daughter with stability and allowed her students to remain with their families during the day. But she and her daughter both plan on returning to their respective Lahaina campuses in October.

‘I’m On A Waitlist Here, I’m On A Waitlist There’

Families have other options. When Rita McClintock heard about the DOE’s waitlist, she enrolled her daughter in , a charter school offering hybrid and distance learning options to students across the state. Within a month of the fires, HTA opened a new campus in Lahaina, enrolling over 115 students in kindergarten to eighth grade who attend classes at the school two to three times a week. 

Once again, families’ demand exceeded available space: interim executive director Matt Zitello said HTA’s waitlist quickly filled to 300 students, forcing the school to close its applications in early September. Some of the families at the Lahaina campus sought out HTA after unsuccessful efforts to enter the DOE’s distance learning program, Zitello said. 

“A few families had said, ‘Oh, I’m on a waitlist here, I’m on a waitlist there,’” Zitello said. “They’re dismayed by the fact that they didn’t get into us.” 

Smaller-scale efforts also emerged to meet families’ educational needs after the fires. McClintock runs a learning group for Lahaina families, relying on community volunteers and donations to teach approximately 20 kindergarten to sixth grade students for four hours a day. McClintock said half of her families came to her learning group when they were unable to transport their children to and from the West Maui learning hub, which provides instruction in two-and-a-half hour blocks. 

While McClintock plans on ending her learning group once Lahaina schools reopen, HTA has no intention of closing down its Lahaina campus. Instead, the school plans to hire more staff and relocate to a permanent location pending final approval from the State Public Charter School Commission, Zitello said.

He added that, despite the DOE’s announcement to reopen Lahaina schools, he has not heard of many families who plan on leaving HTA.

McClintock plans to keep her daughter enrolled since she appreciates the school’s stability and challenging curriculum.

“She’s in the program that’s right for her,” McClintock said. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

This story was originally published in .

Iowa’s public universities should expand distance education offerings, including allowing students at one state university to take courses from another, Board of Regents staff members recommended Wednesday.

Regents Chief Academic Officer Rachel Boon presented the annual distance education report and representatives for the University of Iowa, the University of Northern Iowa, and Iowa State University presented updates at the regents’ meeting.

The report recommendations included an initial focus on expanding graduate and professional offerings before undergraduate expansion and promoting current offerings.

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“The board’s goal was (to) figure out how to do more distance education,” she said. “It seems to be a thing that’s serving students well.”

The regents’ task force recommended the Statewide Extension, Continuing and Distance Education Council also update its structure to align with the current and future means of distance education. The council should review its charge and activities on an annual basis to establish clear goals and tasks, .

Another recommendation was to design a general education course sharing opportunity. According to the meeting documents, it would allow students at one university to take courses from the other two universities.

Boon said this will come from looking at course utilization data to see where this will be the most beneficial to students and universities alike.

“Creating an inventory of joint programs where the institutions already, sort of, mutually support each other with certain programs,” she said. “Right now we’re digging in on where some of the barriers are on some of the course sharing opportunities and focusing in really on the bachelor’s of liberal studies, which is a degree all three universities have that is structured fairly similarly across all three.”

The overall report

showed the number of programs has increased from 183 to 204 since the 2017-18 academic year.  Course sections went down in the 2021-22 academic year by more than 2,000 offerings from 2020-2021.

Nearly 1.1 million students enrolled in non-credit courses in 2021 and 2022, according to the report, nearly doubling the 2020-21 numbers.

All three universities had more students enrolled in distance education courses last year than before the pandemic.

“The 2020-21 academic year had a large increase in distance education due to pandemic response efforts, but in 2021-22 numbers reverted to the upward trend that began before the pandemic,” the report reads.

Universities update programs

Iowa’s three public institutions have updated their online and distance education programs in recent years to improve students’ experiences.

ISU began , a completely online education opportunity, in January. It was built in response to the regents’ 2021-22 Distance Education Task Force and and ISU Online Learning Strategy Task Force in 2021.

Inaugural Director of Iowa State Online Susan Arendt said one of its goals is to grow ISU’s online market share while focusing program innovation and market development tailored to Iowa businesses and employees. Tailoring courses to regional workforce needs was one of the goals presented by Boon.

The UI currently has 11 graduate and seven undergraduate online programs. There are nearly 3,400 students enrolled in only online classes.

UI Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education Tanya Uden-Holman said students take about three to five online courses during their time at the university.

The university conducted the Online Course Review Project and audited more than 1,000 course sections that were not moved online because of COVID. Course review will now take place every three years and colleges will prioritize course development and redesign, which is inline with Boon’s presentation.

“It still remains a smaller percentage of our course offerings,” Uden-Holman said, responding to a question about these classes replacing traditional in-person learning. “We do believe it’s very important to offer that flexibility, however we are obviously a residential campus and having that in-person experience is very important to our students.”

Karen Cunningham, associate dean and director of online education at UNI, said the UNI, Des Moines Area Community College partnership expanded to offer all online programs to students in the partnership.

UNI also launched a new Management: Business Administration online program in 2022.

There are multiple new online undergraduate academic programs, including one for paraeducators and accounting. They were built in response to a lack of educators and accounting professionals in the state, Cunningham said. There are new online graduate programs for students looking to go into mental health counseling, education, and interdisciplinary studies.

Cunningham and ISU Associate Provost Ann Marie VanDerZanden agreed with Uden-Holman and said their online programs are not a replacement for in-person opportunities. Residential programs remain the core of the three institutions while online classes are offered to meet workplace and flexibility needs.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

The findings, consistent among all racial and ethnic groups Axios said, came as students, teachers and parents in New York City and Chicago protested in-person learning.    

Of the 2,093 Americans surveyed over the weekend of Jan. 7-9, 56 percent said avoiding COVID exposure was more important than keeping schools open. 

Here are the poll’s key findings: 

Parents are even more likely to support distance learning amid the surge

Of those polled, 62 percent of parents with school-aged children favored remote learning. Preliminary findings from ����Ӱ��’s parent survey found similar results: 60 percent favored a remote option. 

Republicans more hesitant to close schools 

Differences in how Americans responded to the poll fell squarely along party lines: Only 37 percent of Republican respondents backed remote learning, compared to 70 percent of Democrats. 

Findings also exposed generational and income divides

Younger, lower-income respondents more frequently chose to protect “health and safety” over in-person learning — with more than 60 percent of Gen Z, millennial and Gen X respondents believing schools should move remote. Of boomers, aged 57 or older, 48 percent responded the same.

The poll showed differences along income as well, with 63 percent of Americans earning under $50,000 annually favoring distance learning.  Those earning more than $100,000 were nearly divided, with 49 percent favoring remote and 51 percent backing in-person learning.

Axios noted a key limitation to the findings is that “risk tolerance exists along a spectrum,” but respondents were only offered a choice between prioritizing “health and safety” or in-person learning. 

Parents who opt to send children to in-person classes presumably may feel that “health and safety” is prioritized inside schools, while others believe daily exposure to hundreds of people is not a risk their family is willing or able to take. 

Nearly next school year, according to a recent tally from Burbio, a website that tracks school calendars and reopenings.

Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 128 will hold virtual programs this fall, while 60 — such as those in , and — will offer no fully remote options, save for medical exceptions for immunocompromised students. Another 12 have yet to announce their plans.

The update comes as the highly transmissible Delta variant now accounts for the , casting uncertainty on an upcoming school year that, just weeks ago, many observers had hoped would mark a — and spurring many parents to revise their expectations for the fall.

“Everyone is assuming that all kids are going back into buildings in September,” Annette Anderson, who is a mother of three children in Baltimore City Public Schools, told ����Ӱ��. “And I’m not really clear with the Delta variant what’s going to happen.”

Her kids — rising 8th-, 9th- and 11th-graders — had already endured a year and a half of remote classes, and were itching to see their friends, she said.

But when COVID case counts once again began to rise in late June, her family’s calculus suddenly became much more complicated. Kids under 12 do not yet have access to vaccinations, Anderson points out, and with many schools following a recent update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said vaccinated students and staff could forgo face coverings, she worries that schools could become vectors of spread this fall.

A possible precursor of dangers still to come, the U.S. has experienced a in states such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas in June and July.

“There is still a lot of outstanding questioning on my part about whether or not we are ready to let our kids go back into buildings full time,” said the Baltimore mother, who is also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

At first, “I was comfortable with [my kids] going back to school,” she said, “[but now] the question of children carrying the Delta variant is still very open ended.”

Halfway across the country, just outside of San Antonio, Texas, Deneatra Terry feels similarly. Her state has banned virtual-only school options this fall, and now the mother of two is shopping around for a charter school that would allow her youngest to stay online or keep class sizes low for social distancing.

“If there is something out there … worse than the [previous strains of] COVID, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to open that damn [schoolhouse] door,” she told ����Ӱ��. “If you keep knocking on the door, the devil does answer, eventually.”

The mothers are not alone in their concern. Worry for the highly infectious mutation could impact the schooling choices that many parents make for their kids this fall, says Robin Lake, director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“I think the Delta variant has quite a few families spooked,” she told ����Ӱ�� via email. “A lot of families may decide to hedge their bets and enroll in alternative programs.”

Because the new strain is even than the Alpha variant before it, which originated in the United Kingdom, the coming months may mark the “most dangerous” time in the pandemic for unvaccinated individuals and young people, University of Missouri infectious disease expert Taylor Nelson told ����Ӱ�� in late June.

But while acknowledging that the Delta variant is “incredibly concerning,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says that schools do not have to be risky places for children.

Last year, “we really did see minimal transmission in the K-12 setting, which is reassuring,” he told ����Ӱ��. In Chan’s home state, the vast majority of student and staff coronavirus cases came from out-of-school exposures, he explained.

Last spring, hundreds of academic studies pointed to mitigation measures such as masking and ventilation that schools could use to reopen safely. New CDC guidelines now emphasize flexibility for schools and districts to implement “layered mitigation strategies” to keep kids safe, which proponents say will allow schools more freedom to problem-solve and take local levels of infection into account. Critics meanwhile worry the new guidance will allow decision makers to sidestep key safety measures.

Above all else, however, the Rhode Island doctor emphasizes immunization as the single most effective way to limit spread, including for the new variant.

“We know that the vaccines, certainly the ones we’re using here in the U.S., are effective against the Delta variant,” said Chan. “As long as people in the community … are vaccinated, hopefully the risk of transmission within the K-12 setting will be minimal.”

According to a recent announcement from Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company will seek to expand its existing emergency authorization for shots to . Their pediatric vaccine trials are currently underway. Even with expanded authorization, it’s unclear whether parents will immunize young children in large numbers and there remain swaths of the country, especially in the South, .

In the meantime, Lake, of the University of Washington, underscores the well-documented benefits of face-to-face learning for most students versus attending virtual school.

“Most of the studies comparing learning outcomes in remote learning compared to in-person show students do better both academically and emotionally when they have in-person instruction,” she said.

Ahead of the July 13 Global Education Meeting, UNICEF and UNESCO extolled the benefits of in-person learning, urging decision makers around the world to to “avoid a generational catastrophe.”

Still, there were students and families that thrived in remote learning, the Center for Reinventing Public Education director points out. The key takeaway for district leaders, she says, is that “quality options are the right solution.”

School systems, however, do not yet appear to be altering their plans.

“We’re not seeing any districts walk back plans [for in-person school] yet,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��. Most districts’ strategies for the fall were formulated this past spring and were announced early in the summer, he said.

If spread of the new COVID strain does spur changes to reopening plans, those revisions would likely come “in about a three-week window in advance of school,” according to Roche, because districts take time to alter course.

In the meantime, parents will mull how to balance the academic, social-emotional and physical health needs of their children in yet another uncertain back-to-school season.

“We wanted COVID to go away with a vaccine and it has largely dissipated, but it has not disappeared,” said Anderson, in Baltimore. “So that’s what I’m wrestling with.”