>> Northwest Now is supported in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> Mr. Reykdal: It's a vaccine requirement as a condition of employment.

>> Tom Layson: And with that, the superintendent of public instruction asked Governor Inslee to compel school employees to join state employees and health care workers to get vaccinated.

This was supposed to be the big back-to-normal school year, but the nation's failure to contain the Coronavirus means it's anything but.

Tonight, superintendent Chris Reykdal joins us for a look at the '21/22 school year.

The new Tacoma Public Schools superintendent talks about how his district is going to navigate the ongoing pandemic, and a local school district starts a virtual academy just in time.

Back to school, next on Northwest Now.

[ Music ] Washington State now leads the nation when it comes to vaccine and masking requirements.

When it comes to schools, Governor Inslee said yes to superintendent Reykdal's request.

So, masks will be required, and all staff at all levels will need to be vaccinated.

>> I'm convinced that we are at the point in this pandemic that without these vaccine requirements we will continue to be susceptible to new variants.

So, this is the right thing to do to save lives in the state of Washington.

>> Tom Layson: The Washington Education Association supports masks and vaccinations.

Not only is there a threat of breakthrough infections for adults, but the big risk is to a school employee's unvaccinated children.

Staff exemptions will be offered for medical and religious reasons, but the overarching message is clear.

Kids may be back in school for in-person learning, but full-bore COVID protocols will remain in place when it comes to social distancing, disinfection, student masking, and all of the rest.

Offering a remote or online option is not mandatory, so heading back to the classroom is the only choice for many families and teachers all across western Washington.

But in the Bethel School District, as luck would have it, launching a virtual academy was in the plan for years, even before COVID.

So, now, as I learned during my visit to Spanaway, COVID has given the virtual academy a boost for learners for whom remote learning is a better fit.

>> Welcome to the Bethel Virtual Academy, or BVA, information presentation.

>> Tom Layson: This is video from the Bethel Virtual Academy, launched last year before COVID and in full operation when the pandemic hit, serving as a model for all the classes that had to quickly switch to remote learning last year and proving the concept now heading into year two.

>> Ms. Nollette: We had a really strong showing for students that wanted to come back for year two.

We had families that would reach out to other friends and families even from outside of our own district.

We have a number of students from neighboring districts that are in our academy this year.

So, I think that, again, as our teachers have said, this really works for a lot of kids, and they found a lot of great success with it.

And so, I think that collectively, we can all see there's a need for this kind of a program.

>> Tom Layson: Some of the 800 kids who joined the BVA did it for COVID but now are staying.

It's a good choice for those who need extra help and for those who want to zoom ahead, and even more importantly, this group says, perhaps to be a difference maker for kids who may otherwise be at risk of failing and dropping out.

>> Ms. Dyer: I think that it gives students the ability to attend school, so to speak, to get the education that they need, but also, kind of peeling away a lot of the layers that they had to navigate through when they're attending a brick and mortar school.

So, some students just have anxiety when it comes to, you know, being in a school with hundreds of other students and not even in a pandemic, just in general.

Some students have some difficulty navigating those social norms.

The other thing, too, is you know, you, when you go to a brick and mortar school, especially for secondary, you know, you're going from class to class to class.

You sit down.

You follow instructions from the teacher.

You spend maybe 20 minutes on this task, 30 minutes on that task.

But the setup that we have allows students to not only go back and revisit lessons if they need to [inaudible] repeat information, but it also gives them a chance to work at their own pace.

So, if they're working on a challenging science lesson, for example, and they need to say, you know, I need to pause for a moment, instead of taking an hour, I think I need 90 minutes to digest this information, or I'd like to come back to it tomorrow and learn a little bit more, they're able to do that.

They have that flexibility.

>> Tom Layson: The BVA is high touch with lots of coaching and tutoring with scheduling flexibility and, even so, chances to build relationships with classmates and teachers even in a remote learning environment.

>> Ms. McCarty: I was able to provide some of that but will also be having small groups, and I'll do a lunch bunch on Fridays so that the kids, with no curriculum added in, just a social time with the kids, and they get to share anything going on in their life.

That's when I, you know, meet the family pet, or they get to interact with the other kids.

So, they'll still get elements of that, and then also, from the teacher, I think it's huge that so many of my students came in super anxious, and the first Zoom I had with one student, he glared at me the whole time and said, I don't like you.

And then the last day of school when we turned in all this stuff, he was crying as they rolled up in the car, and I said, mom, why is he crying?

And she said, he just learned that you won't be his teacher next year.

So, I was able to still build those relationships with kids and have that social bond that teacher and students get to have too.

>> Tom Layson: Joining us now is the superintendent of public instruction, Chris Reykdal.

We just came out of a story I shot at the Bethel School District where they have the Bethel Virtual Academy, which by serendipity, they began prior to COVID, so it was a nice thing just to be able to step right into that and keep it rolling.

Why not mandate a statewide option for remote learning?

It seems like it, you know, the system was in place.

What was the thinking on that?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Yeah, I think what we were trying to make clear for parents and students in education systems and school districts was you can have those, because they've really gotten more mature.

We've built some competency to those.

What we've said to folks is you can't exclusively offer that as your only option for families.

You must have an in-person option for the families that really need that, and then you may have remote or virtual academies, and a lot of districts have done that.

But they got to provide something in person for families that really need that.

>> Tom Layson: That relationship piece, why, I don't want to answer the question for you, but why was it so important to get kids back in the classroom?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Yeah, we just know from child development, physically, mentally, emotionally, kids need each other.

They learn from each other.

They learn with each other, and they need that peer mentorship.

They need high-quality educators, and sometimes that best relationship is not necessarily a teacher.

It might be an administrator.

It might be the bus driver or somebody else, but we watch kids develop academically, emotionally, and it's all about them having relationships along the way.

And we saw the downsides of this.

We had to do what we had to do last year, but we saw that anxiety.

We saw that isolation, the disengagement.

We saw it in attendance data.

We saw it in academics.

We knew that that was the right thing in a very uncertain time, but we had to move towards in-person learning again to really build what students need.

>> Tom Layson: You mentioned too those key areas of deficit, both mental health and academic.

I want to tackle them both.

The mental health piece, what's your advice to districts?

You know, this isn't going to be a problem that's going to be solved in a week.

How do, what's the long game there to work on the mental health piece?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Yeah, I think it's a really powerful question.

I'm glad you've asked it, because everyone wants sort of that easy answer.

Like what's the program, what's the protocol, what's the screener we can use?

And my message for everyone is this is tough humanity stuff.

It's got a long duration, so the first thing we should encourage students and families to do is stop holding your breath.

There isn't a moment where the skies part and we get sunshine and it's all clear and this is over.

Think about it as a long-term thing we're struggling through, which means, you got to engage students first and foremost.

They need to feel loved and a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose and meaning before algebra matters to them, before science matters to them.

We want them to keep progressing academically, but in school and in life, they've got to feel that sense of I'm a champion for you and I'm here for you.

That connection make all learning possible, and that is really hard to do when you are on the other side of a two-dimensional screen.

>> Tom Layson: The academic piece, let's talk about that.

We've talked about the summer slide in the past, and you know, the COVID slide is telling the summer slide to hold its beer.

And I think it too is a long-term thing you're going to be able to track for years, all the way through this cohort, more than likely.

How do you mitigate that?

How do you combat that?

And do you think there will be a separate testing protocol for that?

How is testing weaving into this, because you need the data?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Yeah, so we're fortunate to watch other states go through this first.

Some of them really plowed through their standardized exams last spring.

We don't think that was a good testing environment.

That's why we paused and pushed it to fall.

They are trying to navigate assessment systems with half their kids at home and half in person.

So, I don't know how totally reliable that data will be, but the early indication is a couple month's slippage on ELA and a few more months even in quantitative reasoning mathematics.

So, fortunately, our great educators don't need a standardized test to know what their students are going through, and all of our districts have assessments they use along the way.

They use them to inform teaching.

And I think a system like i-Ready, it's one most districts are familiar with, we're already seeing indications of a couple months similar to what we see in other states.

A few months' slippage in English Language Arts and even a few more month in math, we have our kids for 150 to 160 months over their K-12 experience, and right now we're talking about, you know, not learning lost but not the pace we would have expected to the tune of three or four months out of 130, 140, 150 months.

So, lots of time to make sure we recover.

Two point six billion dollars has gone to school districts to help them continue to beef up their protocols around safety but also to focus on those learning recovery strategies, and a lot of that is community-based organizations and partners.

There are a lot of kids engaged this summer to make sure that we didn't combine summer slide and sort of COVID slide, as you said, but they started to build more momentum.

And thus, we start school, and hopefully we're in a better shape here.

>> Tom Layson: Where are some of those dollars going to?

Tutoring, mental health resources?

Just kind of give us a feel for the palate that's out there.

>> Mr. Reykdal: Yeah, all of the above.

The feds authorized this through Congress.

The President signed it.

It was by formula to the states, and the menu is pretty, pretty extensive.

So, there are districts in one-to-one tutoring.

There are districts who put on what we call sort of catch-up programs or intensive programs.

Maybe they brought students in for a week or two this summer for math, where they really pushed them.

We've got community-based organizations working with kids on fitness and being outdoors again and engaging each other and then lots on the mental health side through community-based partners and counties.

Heck, we even involved the cities, Association of Washington Cities.

They've got recreation programs, and what we needed to do is keep kids safe but get them engaged again as a precursor to going to school.

So, all of the above strategies, mostly local districts determine based on their data what they thought would be most effective.

>> Tom Layson: I have no particular insight on this.

I'm not on the FDA, obviously, but I would assume, and I want to state that clearly, it's a guess I am making that they're working toward a childhood immunization here for COVID at some point.

Are you waiting and watching for that?

Are you thinking about policy on that?

Will it become another of the mandatory vaccines?

Give us some insight into, if I gave you a crystal ball, what would it read to you?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Like you, I'm not a public health expert, but I am forced to read this in amazing volumes these days.

Here's everything that we know.

There are definitely clinical trials going on.

They have a much more robust standard than adult clinical trials.

So, more breadth, more time they usually spend on these trials.

And it's all about dosage.

It's not generally about it being different for kids, but it's, you know, body mass and size and developmental.

So, those are occurring.

We keep hearing early winter, November-ish, December, January timeline when they thing something might be available for that 5-to-11-year-old group or maybe even 3-to-11-year-olds.

That means in a state like ours, students aren't even available to midway through the school year, and then there's an entire process.

Unless a governor uses emergency powers, every state has a process through their state board of health to decide if a vaccine authorized by the feds, it's gone through a CDC panel, once it becomes available for states to make a requirement, then the states go through a process.

And so, we still think that's a year away or more, where our state board of health will decide if it's another vaccine added to the six or seven or eight vaccines already required to go to school.

That's what's been so amazing about all this.

All of this culture war around masks and vaccines and, you know, I understand it, but we've had a 92, 93% compliance rate on mandatory vaccines for kids for a long time in this state.

People do it, and that's what's kept our kids so safe.

>> Tom Layson: Yeah.

>> Mr. Reykdal: This will probably get there.

I think it's probably a year away or more.

>> Tom Layson: Good.

Let's talk about the cultural war piece a little bit, staff vaccinations, full-time masking in schools.

There's been a lot of grief at local school boards and in local school districts over this.

A lot of pushback, jobs that should just be about educating the kids and helping the community have become the flashpoint for culture wars.

What's your reaction to that?

Is that a little disappointing as a life-long educator?

And any signs of any rogue school boards in Washington state, and what is the consequences for that should a school district decide, nope, we're out?

>> Mr. Reykdal: Well, the first thing I'll say is we have 1,477 school board members elected locally in their communities in this state.

They are an amazing group of folks overseeing 295 school districts.

Most of them are unpaid or maybe they get a stipend per meeting.

It's an amazing bit of volunteer work on behalf of the community, and I would say to everybody, do not take this out on your local school board members.

You can be mad at the governor.

You can be frustrated and mad at me.

We get lots of volumes of that stuff.

In a public health crisis, the health decisions become these very big state-wide impacts.

They are not locally decided, on the health side of this.

So, take it easy on them.

They're amazing folks doing the best they can, and they were elected to move education policy at the local level, not public health policy or vaccine policy.

That said, most districts are doing great.

They're focusing on the health and safety measures.

They saw the effectiveness of the mask last year to reopen schools.

They now see our mortality rate dropping, you know, compared to where we were a year ago because of vaccines.

They're doing the right stuff.

Some of them are in really tough communities where that is not the preference of the community, and I understand that.

They want to be representative to them.

But so far, not over the line, following the requirements and focusing on public health, but it is a tough job when your community says we don't want this and why aren't you representing us.

What those school board members would say is I was elected to represent you on education policy, but these health mandates come from higher.

>> Tom Layson: And funding is on the line with noncompliance, right.

>> Mr. Reykdal: It is, and so the hard part about this is I wish folks would separate sort of the issue of mask or vaccine to a larger issue.

If a school district willfully violates a law, I have a constitutional duty to enforce the law.

If we had a school district saying, hey, when you come on our campuses you don't need to wear seatbelts when you're driving or don't worry about our firearm policy, if they were willfully violating a law that puts students or staff in danger, we would have to do something about it, and that's what we're doing here.

>> Tom Layson: Chris, thanks so much for coming to Northwest Now.

>> Mr. Reykdal: Appreciate it, thank you.

>> Tom Layson: Josh Garcia has some pretty big shoes to fill as the Tacoma School District's new superintendent, and the challenge is only made more difficult by COVID.

Josh Garcia, thanks for coming to Northwest Now.

Good to have you as a returning guest here as we do typically for the beginning of the school year.

You know, this is your first year as the new superintendent of Tacoma Public Schools.

When you envisioned this job someday when you were younger and starting your career, did you ever think you'd be doing it in the middle of a global crisis?

>> Mr. Garcia: You know, I have never been surprised by that idea of being surprised, but I never could have imagined this.

I don't think any of us did.

I think that, you know, and being in it as long as we have now, you know, 18 months plus has been tough, so.

>> Tom Layson: Yeah, I think there's a lot of COVID fatigue out there.

You know, vaccinations in the schools, it's been very controversial.

How is staff compliance going right now?

Do you have a window into that?

Are you thinking you might lose staff over that?

What's your take on how staff is managing this?

>> Mr. Garcia: You know, this is, first and foremost, a very complex and a personal decision that we recognize that each staff member has to make.

And so, we're trying to inform people about what are their opportunities, what does the law say, giving them the power to make their own decision.

Staff are just coming back this week, so it's still a little too early for us to tell the ramifications or the number of folks either way.

So, I was at Baker Middle School yesterday.

There was a full team there of educators, office staff, practicing social distancing, really diving in and getting excited about bringing kids back.

So, I'm hopeful.

I'm hopeful.

>> Tom Layson: Apart from the COVID issue, we've talked in the past just generally speaking about the teacher shortage and some of those things.

How are you doing?

It may be hard to break it out of COVID, but is the teaching staff, are you getting staff?

I know there's been a tremendous shortage of bus drivers in some districts.

How are things looking for you operationally.

Baker, you said, looked pretty good.

How is it looking district wide operationally to get in and get rolling?

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, first and foremost, you know, teaching, being a paraeducator, being a line cook, being a maintenance operation, working in schools, superintendents, central office, those are tough jobs.

People will go all in.

And so, we have a great team in Tacoma.

Right now we're looking okay as far as making sure that we can operate.

We run a pretty tight, thin ship, and so, there's not a lot of wiggle room, and so, we're hoping our team will come back.

As human beings, we've all struggled.

We have lost folks, and so, our team is also fragile.

You know, they've been working nonstop.

We ran a pretty comprehensive summer program.

There was a lot of work to do.

So, they haven't gotten a break, but they're true heroes.

>> Tom Layson: Talk a little bit about that, and I'm asking you to observe across the profession here now, not necessarily in Tacoma, just when you look across the state, and even nationally, you know.

We had a brief chat before we started taping this about what we're seeing, you know, the pressure on teachers and administrators and people who are trying to serve their communities on the school board.

I mean it's been brutal, and the vitriol that has come out in some of these cases, when you looked across the profession and you talk about teachers and staff members being human beings, man, it's really disappointing.

How are you prepared, I guess, as the superintendent to kind of lead that team and tell everybody it's going to be okay, I guess, you know.

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, you know, we spend a lot of time understanding and helping each other try to understand that we are a team, that we are going through individual things, but, you know, we were called to action to serve kids.

Sometimes that's really hard, because people project their emotions on us.

Sometimes it has nothing to do with us.

Sometimes it may be the global politics, local family issues, but, you know, we've got to feel that, embrace that, be empathetic to that, and then also still move forward with what we think is best for kids.

>> Tom Layson: And that's a good segue into a conversation about mental health issues with kids.

A lot of the research is coming out and even quantifying some of this.

It's certainly, certainly an issue here over the course of the past 18 months.

Is that something that's possible as a school district to deal with?

Is it something that you just have to say, listen, time is what we need.

What's your approach to the mental health issue with kids?

How are students, how are staff and the administration dealing with it?

Where is it on your radar?

I just want your thinking on it.

>> Mr. Garcia: So, it's one of our, been one of our values since we got here in 2012.

We started the Tacoma Whole Job initiative with this idea that kids weren't broken, but mental health is something that we all have to work at, every day.

Physical activity, our awareness of ourselves, our social awareness, our physical activity, and so, we've been working on a comprehensive plan.

Now, we've stepped up our game since COVID, working with great community partners over the course of time, Comprehensive Life Services, Greater Lakes, Multi-care, and we're pushing in to make sure that we have onsite services for our kids.

During COVID, we worked with some virtual services for our kids, and so, we're going to continue to do that, and then we have a lot of preventative things.

We're working with our community partners in engagement strategies around after-school programming, working with providing childcare with our community partners in sites through the district, that's important for our mental health.

When a family knows that they have a safe place that their kid can go after, when a kid knows that they have a safe place.

And so, mental health has always been a part of our framework.

We're double downing.

We're trying to get better at it every day.

We're given new tools.

We have this new app called the Compass app where kids can measure their goals, measures their zones of how am I feeling, what times of days, what are my triggers.

And then even on the basic side of education of trying to work with teaching staff and our principals to say, like what's a reasonable workload during this time, right.

We're going to learn.

We're going to get there, but we got to try to make sure that we're not burying people.

And then on the staff side understanding with the whole educator, that you are human being.

You know, you are a teacher.

You are a paraeducator.

You're a bus driver.

But you're a human being and you have -- >> Tom Layson: And a parent, a lot of them too.

>> Mr. Garcia: And a parent, and a grandparent.

>> Tom Layson: Yep.

>> Mr. Garcia: And these are tough times, and we've lost loved ones.

And you know, we have an employee assistance program, and helping folks understand it's okay to ask for help.

>> Tom Layson: Yeah.

You know, the COVID slide is telling the summer slide to hold its beer.

The research is showing that there is a substantial academic slide that's taking place too.

Again, not something Josh Garcia is going to walk in and cure in a month.

What's your thinking on that?

What's been the, what's the approach when teachers are confronted with, wow, you know, we're behind here.

What's the thinking on that?

How do you attack that?

>> Mr. Garcia: So, first and foremost, I challenge that we're behind.

We are where we are.

You know, it's a global pandemic.

The whole world is where it is.

And so, we really just try to help our educators understand and our families, and our kids, like don't carry the burden that you're behind.

You are where you are.

Now, let's take the next step forward.

What's the next step academically?

So, getting our kids back into school, starting to assess them, getting new baseline data, looking at what are their next steps.

Really double-downing our kids in their post-secondary plans and our high schools again is really an effort that we're excited about.

Saying, look, let's be forward thinking.

Let's not be trapped in COVID.

>> Tom Layson: Yeah, yeah.

Remote learning, Tacoma offers a remote learning option?

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, we have the Tacoma online school.

It's a K-12 school.

Last year we had around 4000 kids at any given time.

It's a new way for us.

It's something that we'll move forward with and continue to offer.

>> Tom Layson: Do you think that COVID proved that model, it's going to increase?

Do you think it's going to be, kind of come and go?

What's your prediction about remote learning and the future and the role it plays in the typical school district?

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, so, remote learning is not necessarily new to COVID.

I think it became more aware for a lot of folks that that was an option.

And so, there's been decades of online learning opportunities, both at the post-secondary world -- you can go online and get your boater's card.

>> Tom Layson: I guess I meant at scale.

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah.

>> Tom Layson: That's what I meant.

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, yeah.

And so, I think as long as there's a demand that, you know, Tacoma will continue to offer options for them.

And then I think for across the board, I think it's become more, I think for families more acceptable that that's a viable option for their child.

It's not less than.

It's not more than.

It's just a right option.

>> Tom Layson: Mm-hmm.

And then the relationship piece there too, you know, the relationship with teachers and the relationship with other students, is that at all a concern with remote learning or no there are opportunities for that engagement in other ways?

What's your thinking on that?

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah.

So, I was just in a, I came from a conversation about our remote learning.

So, our remote learning is offering kids the opportunity to participate in sports and theater and extended learning clubs, both in their neighborhood schools and sometimes with their own online community.

And so, we're really looking at all those opportunities and saying, this is a vehicle to get some content.

The teaching strategy, it's a new way for teachers to support kids.

But I don't think it's that they're going to lose out on those other aspects.

>> Tom Layson: Our last 60 seconds here, you know, there's a lot of federal money sloshing around to help schools get that going with COVID protocols.

What do the protocols look like operationally?

Are you still spraying down classrooms and what will teachers, parents, and students expect when they come into the classroom?

>> Mr. Garcia: Yeah, so the protocol was never to spray them down, but there was this opportunity of cleaning and whatever those expertise.

We get guidance.

We follow that guidance, both Romell [phonetic] and I.

For our case, the Department of Health and OSPI, and so it's triangulated to make sure that those are there.

So, as for funds that are for education, not only for those safety protocols, all your PPEs, a variety of those things, safety upgrades for infrastructure but also for academic and mental health supports for our kids, technology, and so, pretty comprehensive plan.

You can go online and see what our plan is and where the dollars are spent under our budget and finance department.

>> Tom Layson: The masks, no mask debate, the vaccinate or don't vaccinate debate, the at-home or at-school debate will all end someday and be forgotten.

What will not be forgotten is the social, emotional, and academic learning gap that will follow this cohort of kids all the way through their lives.

The bottom line, in the big picture, like a demographic surge, I'm betting we'll be able to follow this anomaly all the way through, you name it, high school graduation rates, college completion, crime statistics, life-time earnings, and perhaps even the national economy for at least a generation.

And that's what we all need to be truly doing to best fight against COVID, to take the safe and effective vaccinations we all have access to.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

To watch this program again or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at KBTC.org, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at Northwestnow.

Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now.

Until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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