“I am nervous, but nervous can be a positive attribute,” the director of the Twin Peaks Charter Academy, Joe Mehsling, said. “We’ve got a lot to mitigate and none of us have done this before.”
While surrounding public schools are closed to students, many Longmont charter or private schools will open their doors on Tuesday. Each new day will mean temperature screenings and children age 11 and over will be required to wear a mask indoors. As preventing the spread of COVID-19 remains a top priority, every institution has had to make their own difficult decision about when, and how to reopen.
“If things can be done as safely as possible, students need to be in school,” Mehsling said. “Students out of school has caused real harm. We’re setting up a multi-year recovery of student’s ability to read, write and do math to be functional citizens. Our society has a large number of families that are ill equipped to monitor their students at home.”
Twin Peaks has seen an influx of applications in recent weeks, after the St. Vrain Valley School District announced that all public school students would start the year learning from home. The charter school offers classes through 12th grade and will open with the same class sizes as previous years. But for the first time in many years, there will likely be a waitlist for prospective kindergarten through fifth grade students.
“We have a pretty stringent enrollment process,” Mehsling said. “We don’t want you to come to Twin Peaks just because it’s open. If this was a grab for student enrollment, I would be hiring another first and fourth grade teacher right now.”
The Gateway Montessori School is preparing to open multiple classrooms for preschool and kindergarten students on Aug. 18. So are other Montessori schools in town along with several daycares that have remained open, in some capacity, over the last few months.
Four of the six charter schools in the St. Vrain district will offer classes in-person by the end of this month. But Flagstaff Academy announced that all of their students, grades K through eighth, will be offered remote learning with small group support for the first quarter of their school year. Saint Vrain Community Montessori Center, also affiliated with the local public school district, decided to start the 2020-2021 school year with students learning exclusively at home.
The state of Colorado has issued no limit on class sizes but the Sunset Academy, a Longmont daycare and private school for infants to kindergarteners announced a deliberate plan to reduce their capacity by 50 percent until the pandemic is over.
“Before the pandemic started, the school had 145 students and 30 teachers on payroll,” the Sunset Academy website stated last month. “When we re-opened on May 11, we had 27 children. The attendance has climbed back since then and today we have about 60 children, with 18 teachers on payroll.
“Enrollment is expected to grow somewhat through the next year but we intend to reduce our capacity voluntarily. On the other hand, despite the drop in enrollment, we intend to keep all 18 current teachers working on payroll.”
While no one agrees on the same approach, everyone agrees that they can’t wait to hear more hopeful news about the coronavirus soon.
“My message to the teachers is that every day is precious to get to know your students in person,” Mehsling said. “So if you have to go remote, we’re going to be better prepared to do it. I have friends up and down the Front Range. They’re worried about starting school remotely, never having met their students.”
Correction: Twin Peaks Charter Academy offers classes for kindergarten through 12th grade. That information was incorrect in the original posting of this story.
