Huntington Beach middle school parents protest lack of full-time classroom instruction
Parents and students frustrated that Huntington Beach City School District’s two middle schools are not going back to full-time in-person instruction, held a protest outside of the district office on Wednesday morning.
The district’s six elementary schools returned to full-time instruction in the last week, joining other area school districts, including Newport Mesa and Ocean View.
But more than 2,000 combined students at Ethel Dwyer and Isaac L. Sowers middle schools remain in an A.M./P.M. hybrid model. The students are on campus for 140 scheduled minutes every weekday except Wednesday, when they’re on campus for 96 minutes.
One of the protest attendees was Mike Ryan, a Huntington Beach resident whose daughter Maddy is a seventh-grader at Sowers Middle School. He said he has exchanged multiple emails with Huntington Beach City School District Supt. Leisa Winston over the issue in recent days, requesting specific numbers on the size of each classroom.
Ryan said he’s concerned his daughter is not getting the instruction she needs as she enters her important eighth-grade year, and eventually high school.
“If we know that it’s really impossible for the district to [bring middle school students back full-time], we’re OK, but they’ve not shown us anything that it’s really impossible to do,” Ryan said.
“They’re just saying, ‘It can’t be done.’ I think what’s happening is that with eight weeks left, they’re just deciding it’s easier to push it under the rug and wait until next year and try to make changes. My fear is, nothing’s going to change over the summer either.”
Winston, who was hired as the district’s superintendent in November and started in her new role in January, noted in a message to families last week that the district has an average maximum classroom capacity of 27 students.
That number follows the California Department of Public Health’s guidelines of at least three feet physical distancing between each student, and six feet between students and the teacher.
Sowers currently has 34 class periods that exceed the capacity and Dwyer has 51, Winston said, making full-time in-person instruction infeasible. Additionally, she said to families that creating new classes and hiring new teachers also was not possible in such a short timeline; the school year runs through June 25.
“The main challenge at the middle school level is class size,” Winston said in a phone interview Wednesday. “We had our site staff evaluate the spaces. They didn’t record the measurements, because it’s not just about the size of the classroom. There’s a lot of other pieces that go into it, like whether you’re talking about a science lab, or talking about the type of instruction that goes on in that classroom.
“We have fully returned our elementary schools back to pre-pandemic schedules, and it was quite a feat to do. The necessary class-size adjustments at elementary were feasible because they were already smaller and students are already placed in stable cohorts. Developmentally, we also know that younger students had more challenges with distance learning, so that’s where we started.”
Autumn DiGiovanni, who attended the protest, said the current setup provides a predicament for her seventh-grade daughter Victoria, who attends Sowers. She watched, upset, as Newport Mesa Unified School District opened secondary schools for full-time in-person instruction this week.
“I have to work, so I leave my daughter home for eight, nine hours a day,” DiGiovanni said.
“Is that acceptable? Should she be parenting herself at 12 years old? I’ve still got to pay my mortgage, I’ve still got to make my car payment, I’ve still got to buy food for my children. I’ve got to go to work, and she can’t come with me.”
Middle school students also attended Wednesday’s protest. At one point, they held signs in front of the doors of the district office and chanted, “What about us?”
“We’re tired of staying in school for only two hours,” said Brooklynn Burnside, 13, an eighth-grade student at Sowers who will attend Edison High School next year. “It’s a waste of time and we don’t really learn anything. We need more time in class.”
Winston said class-size reductions are planned for the 2021-22 school year and that it is her intention for all HBCSD schools, including the middle schools, to be in full-time in-person instruction this fall.
Though many of the parents at Wednesday’s protest have emailed her and school board members requesting a special meeting to bring kids back full-time at Dwyer and Sowers this year, she said the board has not requested another special meeting to discuss it.
The current schedule was discussed and finalized during a special meeting on March 30.
“I certainly have the passion and the concerns that these families have, and completely respect their right to share their frustrations,” Winston said.
“We’re all tired of the restrictions and want our lives back to normal as much as possible, and we share their interest in providing as much in-person instruction as possible.”
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