University High School Spanish teacher Alicia Lara, far left, joins fellow teachers, staff, parents and supporters outside of Tucson Unified School District headquarters at 1010 E. 10th St. on Oct. 5, 2020, to protest the possible start to hybrid learning on Oct. 19.

 Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star

Tucson's largest school district is pushing back its reopening date, potentially to mid-November or even later due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

At the Oct. 6 meeting, TUSD Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo recommended delaying the start date for hybrid in-person learning until Nov. 12 to allow for more time to create a good instructional model, to assuage some of the concerns about the recent surge of coronavirus cases at the University of Arizona and to learn from the other school districts in the county, which have either already opened for hybrid learning or plan to in the next few weeks.

Although the Pima County Health Department has given schools the go-ahead to open for hybrid — a mix of in-person and online learning — one of the public health metrics the county and state has been relying on to predict school safety is in the red due to a recent spike at the UA. That heightens the risk for TUSD, which has six campuses that are close to the university.

The governing board’s decision to wait on choosing a start date came after a contentious debate where three board members voiced support for waiting to reopen schools, even for hybrid learning, until January. In recent weeks, the school district had been planning for an Oct. 19 start date.

Board member Rachael Sedgwick, along with Adelita Grijalva and Leila Counts, said making the decision to wait until the end of the semester would allow both teachers and families some surety on what the next quarter would look like rather than revisiting the topic every couple of weeks.

“I think that we owe our community a path that is clear and that we need to communicate it," Sedgwick said at the meeting. "I think that the best thing that we can do given the uncertainty today is to just agree that we should put off the opening of school until the end of the winter semester."

Although many other local districts have either begun hybrid or plan to later this month, TUSD is in a different position because of the sheer number of people they serve, including 42,000 students, their families, and thousands of educators and staff, Sedgwick said. 

“If we open and people get sick then we are going to decimate the numbers for Pima County, and I think that we have to take that responsibility very seriously,” she said. “We owe our educators some clarity and some certainty as well as our students and all of our community. I think the best thing that we can do is to say we will stay closed until the whole world comes back to normal and hopefully that will be in 2021.”

A staff survey done by the district found that more than 71% of teachers who responded wanted to stick with all remote learning for the second quarter, while a parent survey found that 45% of families wanted to begin a hybrid model.

This video offers some pros and cons of online education, as many schools and universities have suspended in-person classes due to the spread of the coronavirus.

TUSD’s hybrid model

Whenever TUSD does open its 80-plus schools, the district's hybrid model will look different than many of their neighboring districts. 

TUSD approved a model on Oct. 6 that has in-person students working with teachers in classrooms in the mornings and remote students working with teachers over Zoom in the afternoons. This method keeps students with the teachers they already have. 

This model would have in-person learners on campus four days a week, and on Wednesdays everyone would be learning remotely.

Besides teachers keeping their same students, some of the benefits of this model are that teachers will not have to manage two instructional environments simultaneously, on-campus students will have more socialization time, students who continue with remote learning will have five days a week of live teaching and there will be blocked out time in the elementary levels for socio-emotional learning and special classes, Trujillo said.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Tucson-area schools

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Contact reporter Danyelle Khmara at dkhmara@tucson.com or 573-4223. On Twitter: @DanyelleKhmara