“If anyone wishes to speak, here’s the form to fill out,” Board President Bob Geist offered to public attendees prior to the school board meeting start this Monday, July 28. “No one is required to speak.”

Geist needn’t have bothered with his admonition. They would speak in spite of not being required.

The Stanley-Boyd Board of Education met prior to adjournment this Monday July 28. Present in person for the Board were Denise Hoffstatter, Jeff Boie, Ryan Lewallen, Bob Geist, Toni Seidl, and Lance Carlson. Chad Verbeten was away on job-related business and phoned in via a smartphone cellular link. Present along with the school board members were several administrative team and other staff members from the Stanley-Boyd School District, among them Middle School Principal David Ludy, Superintendent Jeff Koenig, Secretary Sue Kiraly, High School Principal Tanya Mahr, and Pupil Services Director Krystle Bacha. In a drawn out topic discussion lasting over two-and-a-half hours, the board ultimately voted 5-2 to adopt a plan of modified A/B cohort group instruction as presented by the Superintendent for the upcoming district school year. Under the modified plan, Group A would attend school on-site Mondays and Wednesday, while Group B would attend on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with both groups learning online on Fridays. Board members Verbeten and Boie voted no to the proposal. First though, there was some extended public comment!

Among those district parents who had come to share their thoughts was Kenda Alix, a local mom and Stanley-Boyd alumna who asked about getting help with internet access. Despite living in town, she had no internet, and there was none to speak of without the money coming out of her pocket. As such, online school presented a problem, one that others echoed. Another local resident had a question of their own.

“What happens when someone comes into the building who is asymptomatic?” they asked, sharing that they felt it was a mistake to be opening even partially back up on site. As the night turned out, the board partly agreed, resisting a move to open on-site five days a week and instead staggering instruction in cohorts, the modified A/B plan. There was still more comment to take in though!

Appearing third in line to speak was Heather Vait, who shared that she had decided to speak in the last ten minutes, and that as a sports mom it was hard to watch her son with his senior year in sports the way things were. She also brought up the plight of other kids for which school was their safe place.

“This is their safe place,” she said. “They don’t have a place to go.” There were also the common issues of internet connectivity and finding daycare, while Vait shared that the suicide hotline call rate had increased in the present, a sign of the stress that many were under, including kids.

Following Vait was another local mom named Tarina Allard, who said that she felt kids needed school, especially for mental health reasons. Rounding out the input of moms during public comment was Jasmine Laager, who shared her thoughts that kids needed interaction, and that satellite internet as the only option was slow where she lived in the country. Superintendent Jeff Koenig said he understood internet issues as one who experienced them where he lived and was sympathetic as he went into agenda item 2.0, Curriculum and Instruction.

“As I get going that’s the first thing that’s guiding our decisions on this,” he said of local parent and student feedback. “I don’t think anyone in this building thought that what happened this spring was good,” he said. “I call it triage education.” With that, Koenig went into some different options the district had considered.

Option one was splitting students into two groups or ‘cohorts’ labeled A and B, with a two-day rotation schedule and online instruction Fridays, with elementary in person. While masks were only somewhat popular or necessary when parents were asked, the ratio flipped dramatically when staff were polled, with 73 percent feeling they were necessary. Koenig also had an insight to share.

“I also realized mask is the wrong word to use,” he said of some survey question wording. “The correct term to use is face covering.” The district has 2,000 cloth face coverings and will provide two to each student, requiring them in certain situations where close contact is deemed unavoidable, while relaxing this requirement somewhat in others. Those not wishing to do so will have the option of online instruction. Contact with someone who later tests positive for covid-19, moreover, is defined as having been six feet or less away from them for 15 minutes without a mask, so that hall transfers and other brief interactions in a masked setting are not considered to be ‘contact.’ But first, there was option two to consider—or not.

“The question is, what’s sustainable?” Koenig asked when he related that a month ago the district would have been onboard with five day instruction on-site, but that as the month had progressed the local school district’s boundaries on the state map had started to fill with the red symbolizing COVID cases, a small corner of the district in Taylor County being free of any such infestation. Koenig later shared that both adult and student age infections were known of by the district in the area, though identifying details are secure on account of HIPPA. Meanwhile, staff absences were considered the most likely to shut Stanley-Boyd Schools down rather than COVID-19, as staff who might have any symptoms like a fever and/or the possibility of having and transmitting the virus would be barred from coming in to school, as would visitors for the upcoming year. There were also cleanliness standards to obey.

“We talked about increased cleaning, but what we really mean is increased sanitizing,” Koenig said. “We’re going to be sanitizing all the time.” The district was also switching to CANVAS over Google Classroom as being a better learning platform used by the UW-university system, while the likelihood that school would shut down on site at some point didn’t necessarily mean that instruction would end. Instead, the district was looking at jetpacks, a way to access the internet in areas where such coverage was spotty. In cases of pure necessity, there was always the school parking lot. Then it was truly history making: the board suspended the rules for meeting décor.

“Are you going to answer parent’s questions?” Board President Geist was asked by one present.

“We would have to suspend the rules to do that,” Mr. Geist said. No matter. The school board voted unanimously to suspend the regular meeting rules, and it was into an open discussion and parent question time! One mom in particular showed signs of stress as she her dilemma.

Leaving home in the early morning for work with both her and her husband working full-time jobs, she wouldn’t be able to distance school the couple’s young children by internet, or find easy childcare.

“My daycare is closed,” she said. There needed to be clarity from the district so that she would be able to plan. Another parent had internet issues, living as she did almost 20 miles out of town. Only the Village of Boyd and City of Stanley had internet of 25 megabytes per second, the definition of broadband. What if the internet dropped? Mr. Koenig sought to reassure her.

“No district attorney in the State would prosecute a student for truancy in the current circumstances,” he said, saying that outside this there was little the district would be able to do. Meanwhile, Principal Mahr of the High School had additional info. The district was looking into the ability to record class sessions using CANVAS for such situations. Even if a student couldn’t log in at the prescribed time, they would still be able to potentially access the content at a later time, and class schedules would hold. Meanwhile, though some sports would start on time (cross country and golf), other sports were potentially problematic. Case in point: wrestling was allowed in the WIAA, provided the very important stipulation that opponents did not touch.

“The guidelines aren’t realistic,” Koenig said of school sports. Speaking of which, the Superintendent said that he had recommended that all WIAA athletes be required to learn online as opposed to on-site, since sports would otherwise throw a wrench in the social distance protocols. Koenig is also the district football coach, but that was no salve.

“They didn’t care about by opinion,” he said of the WIAA response to his online classes only suggestion, as it was shared later that the UW-system had shut down college sports, a major bummer for the many student athletes affected, including at least one school board member’s child. The possibility of livestreaming sports events was raised, but there would be no spectators. The possibility of at least letting senior parents watch events was raised—also touching on board members lives together with the general public—but issues of enforcement were raised along with the divided local responses in the wake of the Wisconsin Supreme Court striking down Governor Ever’s Safer at Home Order. As a result of the Court’s decision, Stanley-Boyd was on its own for making sports rules, but so were Thorp and Cadott. In short, there was no united response front to Covid, but only ‘guidelines,’ a distinction of Wisconsin versus other states. One mom present shared her view that with all the protests, all it would take was “one angry parent” at a sporting event to start a riot.

Bad idea, in other words— and then there were face coverings.

Koenig shared the news that the district had received an unsolicited email from Mayo Clinic with other Chippewa districts that pleaded for face coverings, and that all the medical professionals they had spoken too—without exception—had said the same. Meanwhile, there was activity from the smartphone speaker “So, Mr. Koenig,” a voice rang out. “Chad Verbeten.” Away from the school board meeting on a previously scheduled unavoidable job-related matter (Mr. Verbeten is a trained attorney), the long-distance attendee shared his thoughts about school reopening. Among his thoughts were that if the largest district in Chippewa County could do five day on-site instruction, Stanley-Boyd could too. Others weren’t so sure.

“What about Mosinee and Tomah?” Hoffstatter asked. After a 5-2 vote later in the night, school at Stanley-Boyd is set to start under a modified A/B group model on August 20.

The many faces and voices of the July 2020 Stanley-Boyd School Board meeting. From top left clockwise: Denise Hoffstatter and Kenda Alix; Tarina Allard; Jasmine Laager; Superintendent Jeff Koenig; board members Toni Seid and Lance Carlson; and Chad Verbeten. Photo by Joseph Back.