WESTFIELD – After four hours of discussion and debate, the Westfield School Committee voted in favor of a phased model for reopening Westfield Public Schools in the fall.

At its Aug. 10 meeting, the committee approved a plan that calls for all Westfield students to begin the year with remote learning, with the exception of students at Westfield Technical Academy, who will return in a hybrid format of one week in shops and one week learning remotely. The second step to reopening will be the reintroduction of high-needs students to school buildings and the third is the return of kindergarten and Fort Meadow students. The school committee would determine when the schools advance to the next step.

With the plan approved, the committee also quickly approved the new school year calendar with classes opening for grades 1-10 on Sept. 14. Kindergarten and Fort Meadow students begin school on Sept. 24.

During the meeting, Public Health Director Joe Rouse expressed to the committee his concerns over a hybrid or full in-person model. He recommended that remote learning continue through the end of the 2020 calendar year. School Committee member Bo Sullivan suggested that the schools start fully remote and the committee take a vote at its first November meeting to decide if they wanted to continue with remote learning, but a motion did not pass.

Rouse said, “I personally see no way that we can do this without being rash and ill-advised, but to do remote learning right from the beginning and stick with that as long as we can until we have some kind of relief.”

He added, “We’ve already taken a step back in the state and the governor has acknowledged our numbers are getting to be a bit too much. They’re not horrible but they’re not as flatlined as they were a month ago. So, I don’t want to see us regress in this whole process.”

Rouse added that one of his concerns is that the virus is spreading back into Massachusetts from other states. “The reality is we’re in a safe zone right now, we’re kind of on our own little island in Massachusetts, all around us is red. We don’t know the students and teachers that are going to be coming back in the first two weeks of school that they have not divulged to anybody,” he said.

Rouse said that the city has already been working on plans for when a vaccine is available, but his biggest concern was how much of a potential vaccine would be available in Western Massachusetts.

“We have plans for that, we’ve been planning for that. But the wild card in that scenario is how much are we are going to be given as opposed to the eastern part, that’s a problem,” he said.

He added that teachers have voiced their own concerns about returning and said, “I’ve talked to lots of teachers, and they’re scared about going back. They’re not privy to all the information that we are, they just hear this as being a thing that they’re going to have to go back to school and be exposed.”

Superintendent Stefan Czaporowski present the district’s reopening plan with a power point presentation broken into three parts – one focused on the hybrid model, the second on remote learning, and the third on complete in-person learning.

As Czaporowski stated previously, in the remote learning model, students would strictly be learning from home in a graded and more rigorous environment than what the district used in the spring. The in-person model, which was not up for a vote at the meeting, would only be implemented when there is a vaccine for the virus.

In the hybrid model, Czaporowski said students would be brought back in a phased in approach. He said, “We’ve been talking about phases for months now for the hybrid model and we really thought from the beginning of our planning that we would mirror the state and what they did with a phased in reopening plan, we really liked what they did.”

As for each phase, phase one would possibly include kindergarten, “high needs” students, and career technical education students. In phase two, students entering a new building in grades one, five, seven and nine would return in a hybrid model. In phase three, all students would return to a hybrid model. Phase four would be a full return because there is a vaccine or treatment for the virus.

Before the committee voted, Czaporowski said that his team was still trying to determine if kindergarten students should return in phase one or phase two of the hybrid plan.

He said, “We realize that if we reopen to a hybrid learning model that our kindergarten students need to be in school, so they can learn routines and so on. But we don’t know if phase one or phase two is appropriate.”

During the presentation, he reiterated that parents had the option to enroll their students in remote learning and would be able to make their decision in a survey that will be sent to families. He added that over 20 percent of the district’s families have opted for remote learning.

Karen Kennedy, the autism consultant for both high schools, also said during the meeting that one of her biggest concerns was keeping “high needs” students in school more often than other students.

“As a special educator and someone who has taught children with special needs, I don’t believe this population should be the experiment to see how reopening goes. These are the students with the most health issues and who present challenging behaviors that will require less than three feet distance in order to maintain safety,” she said.

School Committee member Cindy Sullivan said she wished the committee had more time to discuss the reopening plan and did not meet enough to ask questions about reopening.

She said, “I’m frustrated with the process, this is the most important decision any of us have ever made, and I feel like we had more meetings about other things than we did about this. I feel like there hasn’t been enough time to ask questions and process the information publicly.”

Residents can find the entire Return to School presentation on the Westfield Public Schools’ website and the revised school calendar on its Facebook page.

The Westfield School Committee next meets on Aug. 17