With less than two weeks before remote learning for Laconia students begins, the School District is struggling to find enough teachers who will conduct classes online.
Twenty percent of the approximately 2,000 students in the district will be learning online until at least mid-November, Superintendent Steve Tucker told the School Board last week. He estimated that 13 or 14 teachers will be required to handle all the classes.
To date, the district has been able to sign up eight teachers for remote-learning instruction.
Gail Bourn and Angel Burke, both academic coordinators in the district, said they were still working to find teachers to fill the other five or six positions.
Tucker said if the district is unable to hire additional teachers to fill the needed positions, faculty members who at present are slated to handle in-person classes may be reassigned to do remote learning.
He told the board that teachers will not be handling in-person instruction and remote learning simultaneously.
“To have teachers working remotely and in the classroom is really challenging,” he said.
The four core curriculum subjects — math, science, English, and social studies — will be the only subjects taught in remote learning. Foreign language and other elective subjects will not be available, Tucker said.
Most Laconia students will start off the school year next Wednesday with a hybrid schedule, alternating between days of in-school instruction and at-home learning and assignments.
Those students could, however, be back in school full-time as early as the end of September, under the school reopening plan the board approved one month ago. Remote learning is scheduled to begin on Sept. 14.
Those students who will be learning remotely are doing so mostly because they have underlying health conditions that could make them more susceptible to coronavirus, which has infected 7,297 in the state, 125 of them in Belknap County.
Of the eight teachers who have signed up to provide on-line learning, five are doing so for medical reasons. Another three are coming out of retirement.
The School Board on Tuesday authorized the district to spend $52,000 on salaries for the remote-learning teachers for the first academic quarter which ends on Nov. 13. That money will come from the approximately $1 million the district received through federal COVID-19 aid.
In a related matter, the board approved the spending of up to $125,000 in order to hire additional maintenance personnel or contract with outside custodial services. The extra help is needed in order to follow federal and state guidelines designed to minimize the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Money for those expenses will also come from COVID funds.
Tucker also told the board that some students who until now have been able to ride the bus to school may not be able to do so this year.
Elementary school students who live a mile or more from their school are entitled to ride the bus. The minimum distance for middle school and high school students is two miles, Tucker said. But in the past some students who live inside the walking zones have been able to ride the bus by walking to the nearest school bus stop where they get on the bus. Because the buses almost always had room this had not been a problem. But because of social-distancing restrictions school buses now can carry half the number of students as before, or less.
He said students who live inside the walking zone can call the School Department to request that they be allowed to ride the bus, but permission will be granted on a case-by-case basis.
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