LONGMEADOW – At the Nov. 24 Longmeadow School Committee meeting, the committee discussed whether or not they should proceed with winter athletics, and should they continue maintaining their position of not participating against communities that are designated as red.

Recently, the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) released their sports modifications for the 2020-2021 season. Basketball, ice hockey, swimming and diving and alpine skiing will remain in the winter sports season. As of this release, indoor track has moved to Fall 2, while wrestling and competitive cheer have moved to the spring.

Though the MIAA said practices can start as early as Dec. 14, the Pioneer Valley Interscholastic Athletic Conference (PVIAC) stated that they will not start any earlier than Jan. 4.

In a slide presentation, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs outlined the sports into three categories: low risk, moderate risk and high risk.

As low risk, alpine skiing can participate in individual or socially distanced group activities, including non-contact workouts, aerobic conditioning, individual skill work and drills, competitive practices including intra-team/group games, contact drills and scrimmages, and additionally, competitions and tournaments.

As moderate risk, swimming and diving can participate in individual or socially distanced group activities, competitive practices and competitions.

As high risk, basketball and ice hockey can only participate in individual or socially distanced group activities, competitive practices and competitions.
Longmeadow High School Principal Tom Landers said, “The recommendation is that we move forward, but would like to come back to the committee in mid-December with some updates and look at the COVID numbers at that time.”

Director of Athletics Michael Capotosto responded, “We want to continue to move forward and gathering information. There’s a lot of  information that needs to be gathered over the next week to two weeks that could impact winter sports.”

Capotosto will speak with the PVIAC, the coaching staff, ice hockey rinks and town health officials on reviewing modifications, guidelines and protocols to see what they can do for the winter sport season.

The committee discussed the possibility of bringing in more students for in-person learning in grades three through five.  

“To do this safely and to have it replicate the K-2 approach, we would need to hire additional staff. It’s not enough staff to reassign even with our most creative efforts and even with everyone’s great flexibility,” said Superintendent M. Martin O’Shea. “We have begun some preliminary planning and our initial estimates are that we would need over six additional FTEs [full-time equivalent].”

O’Shea explained he wanted a sense of whether or not the committee would like for him to continue planning in this direction, as he sees this as a feasibility study.

“We want to continue to explore the feasibility of bringing back our [grades] 3-5 students for daily in-person learning four days a week,” O’Shea responded. “If the committee is comfortable with us to continue planning in this direction, we’d like to post these positions as anticipated openings as soon as this makes sense to the committee and as soon as you’re comfortable with us moving forward with these anticipated openings. This is one of the key considerations that we have to work through as quickly as possible. Whatever we do, we’d like it to be consistent across the three schools.”