Los Fresnos CISD students, teachers and staff are preparing for an academic year of in-person learning, making accommodations for the COVID-19 pandemic but returning to fully in-person instruction with confidence.
“The thing about this year is that 14 months ago we didn’t have a game plan, and now we have been blessed with this vaccine, and I’ve been told that in November the vaccine will be available to children under 12, so we can look forward to that, but we can approach this year with confidence that the measures we put in place a year ago, the game plan if you will, yielded the results we were looking for,” Superintendent Gonzalo Salazar said Friday.
Because the Texas Legislature will not provide funding for school districts to offer virtual instruction in 2021-2022, the Los Fresnos Consolidated Independent School District will no longer offer a distance learning option.
The district will return to fully in-person instruction, continuing the strategy established last school year in its Start Safe, Finish Strong plan, Salazar said.
And with Gov. Gregg Abbott’s executive order prohibiting school districts from requiring facial coverings, Los Fresnos will continue to highly recommend but not require masks for all unvaccinated students, teachers, staff and visitors. As well, the district will continue to follow social distancing guidelines and employ the contact-tracing, sanitation, disinfection and air quality measures put in place over the past year, Salazar said
“We had as many as 76% of elementary students participate in in-person instruction, and we were able to do so in a safe way,” Salazar said. “Every one of our students is a point of pride for us. We set out to educate the whole child, and we can look to the future knowing that the measures we put in place, the collaboration between the city, the county health department, and the support we have from parents will lead to a better year for us.”
While there was no STAAR exam last year, “it allowed us to focus on other aspets of the academic experience,” including qualifying for the sweet 16 in both District 32-6A baseball and softball, “which is unheard of,” Salazar said.
Los Fresnos teachers report to classrooms Monday, and students a week later on Aug. 16. Convocation, a district-wide unifying ceremony, is Thursday in Leo Aguilar Memorial Stadium.
“Convocation for us is an opportunity to come together as one, and we set the tone for the start of the school year,” Salazar said. “It will focus on us being a mission-driven, goal-oriented organization with a growth mindset that asks, are we helping students grow.”
Recognizing that the coming school will be unlike any other, with some students absent from actual classrooms as many as 18 months, the Texas Education Agency is requiring districts to ensure that students recover lost learning while making sure their social-emotional needs are being met.
“The coming week is a week of teacher in-service, and so we have a number of sessions that are designed to meet the social-emotional needs of our students,” Salazar said.
Districts are required to provide a minimum of 30 hours of instruction to remediate lost learning, “so we’re going to provide accelerated learning to the tune of 30 additional instructional hours for students in need of remediation. We’re going to do that in small class sizes, in small cohorts of students, and we will offer prescriptive instruction” that targets a student’s areas of weakness and monitors his or her progress as judged by Response To Intervention teams. The approach requires a significant amount of progress monitoring, Salazar said.
“It all starts with the first day of school establishing a rapport between the teacher and student, and then the RTI team will also provide guidance,” he said.
Salazar said the district has hired social workers and that counselors are receiving special training “on identifying the social-emotional learning needs of our students and responding to those needs with interventions.”
On Friday the district finalized its Safe Return to In-Person Instruction and continuity of services plan, shared it with parents and posted it to the district website, lfcisd.net. The plan details how Los Fresnos CISD will operate in the coming year.
