Following a summer of indecision and fear of the unknown, New Tampa’s schools finally opened their doors to students for in-person learning for the first time since they closed in March due to Covid-19.
“Woo hoo!,” shouted one parent, as she drove off smiling after dropping her two kids off at Benito Middle School.
Students spent the first week of the 2020-21 school year eLearning only, as the fight over whether or not to open brick-and-mortar classrooms for students and teachers raged on.
The Hillsborough School Board initially leaned towards doing eLearning only for the first nine weeks, before settling for four weeks after consulting a panel of medical experts. However, that decision was then overturned by Superintendent Addison Davis, after Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran threatened to withhold millions of dollars in funding to schools that did not offer a brick-and-mortar option for parents.
Busy at work cleaning and prepping their classrooms for a socially-distant learning experience, teachers finally opened the doors to their students on August 31.
After the first week, Chiles principal Teresa Evans said things went “remarkably well.” At Chiles, roughly 450 students were home learning online, while 400 or so learned in classrooms. Evans said none of her teachers were forced back into the classrooms, and praised their efforts in the opening week.
“I think we planned and planned and planned and what we planned has worked out so far,” Evans said. “The kids aren’t struggling with masks the way people thought. They have been very compliant, and the parents have been incredibly compliant and helpful in following the new rules.”
Those new rules include keeping desks as far apart from each other as possible, eating lunches outside under the school’s covered courts keeping everything as clean and sanitized as possible.
“We were nervous, but never terribly worried,” Evans says. “We were very careful and will continue to be, and we are tweaking things as we go.”
While the Covid-19 numbers were slightly rising in Hillsborough County during the first week, schools hadn’t reported any large outbreaks.
According to the school district’s Covid-19 dashboard, the first four days produced only 21 positive cases among students, and another nine from school staff.
The district is not reporting if any classrooms have been quarantined.
From March through July, the district reported 284 confirmed cases of Covid-19.
In New Tampa, the only schools to report any cases were Freedom High and Tampa Palms Elementary, with each reporting one student positive from the first day of school.
Although Hillsborough County is giving parents three choices for the upcoming fall semester, it really comes down to two choices — learn in a traditional classroom with other students, restoring the social interaction and face-to-face contact that are the stalwarts of education; or learn in a more isolated and individual-based online format at home that makes it easier to avoid contracting the virus and transmitting it to others.
However, there is a group of local parents considering something else — merging the classroom and online settings together in a unique collaboration that, they believe, will offer the best of both worlds.
Tampa Palms resident Jenni Wolgemuth, an Associate Professor of measurement and research at the USF College of Education and mother of a first- and fifth-grader, is helping to organize a group of 4-5 families whose children will learn online, but will learn together in a small “learning pod” overseen by a privately hired learning support specialist.
“A one-room school house,” Wolgemuth calls it. “It is an attempt to create a bubble around a group of families, all agreeing to similar standards of social distancing.”
That school house, or learning “pod,” that Wolgemuth has organized will have nine students in it. Four of the students are fifth graders, who would hopefully have the same teachers at the charter school they all attended last year.
The pod also will include two first-graders, a third grader, an eighth grader and a ninth-grader. The parents would rotate hosting and the kids would bring their lunches and eat together and have time for outdoor activities together, too.
Everyone would still be taught by their school’s teachers through the online platform and Zoom video classrooms used by their schools. However, the parents are already interviewing people to be a support specialist, who would monitor the pod from 8 a.m.-3 p.m. and help the students with technology issues, staying on task and doing their assignments.
“Basically what we would have been doing if we had been home,” Wolgemuth says.
The idea was Wolgemuth’s brainchild and she says she began thinking about the learning pod solution before the Hillsborough School District issued its choices for parents. She thought the District was too comfortable with the idea that everything would be fine by August. “I’m a planner,” she says. “This was my plan A.”
She mentioned the concept to friends, but the response, at first, was tepid. She continued, however, to bring it up in conversations.
When she had a Zoom call with other parents after the choices were revealed by the District, there was still some hesitation. During that call with other mothers, however, one of the husbands, a doctor who works with Covid-19 patients, overheard the plan.
“That is a really good idea,” he said, and the plan started to take root.
There are still hoops to jump through for Wolgemuth and her group, which includes a second Tampa Palms family, two families from Lutz and another from Carrollwood.
They will have to see how the pod works for the younger students, namely the two first graders. And, having nine or so computers using the same WiFi network could create issues that would need to be addressed.
Otherwise, Wolgemuth thinks the idea is the best fix for one semester, with the hopes that the coronavirus can be brought under control and that everyone can go back to their brick-and-mortar schools in January.
Like most schools, the Turner/Bartels K-8 (TBK8) School hasn’t had enough money available to just give teachers to use in their classrooms.
Until now.
On March 26, the newly opened Burlington store in the Cypress Creek Town Center on the north side of S.R. 56 said hello to the local community it hopes to serve by presenting TBK8 principal Cindy Land with a $10,000 check during a school pep rally as part of the AdoptAClassroom.org program.
AdoptAClassroom.org provides teachers with an online marketplace of nearly 30 school specialty and office supply vendors where they can purchase the materials and tools they need at a discount.
Burlington makes a donation to a local school in each Grand Opening market to celebrate a new store’s location.
“They had one stipulation and that was that the money gets to the kids and the teachers, and it will,” said Land. “There’s not many opportunities for them to have extra cash for their classroom and we want to make this available for everyone.”
Marcus Britt, an ESE Teacher at TBK8 the past five years, said he and most other teachers have had to dip into their own pockets at times to buy the supplies they need.
“Donations, like the one we received today, are incredibly valuable,” he said. “We’re very thankful.”
As for his portion of the $10,000, Britt says he doesn’t know exactly what he’ll buy for his classroom but can’t wait to find out.
“I still need to figure out how I’m going to spend my portion of the funding,” he said. “But no matter what, it will be well spent in a manner that directly affects the student experience.”
Land said it was the biggest donation the school, which opened in 2014, has ever received. Last year, the school received $1,000 from WFLA-TV Channel 8 for being picked as a School of The Week.
Wharton’s Tim Norwood and Rachel Welsh, 3rd place, Structural Design
TECH SAVVY STUDENTS: A number of students from Turner/Bartels K-8 School (TBK8) and Wharton High earned several awards from the Technology Student Association (TSA) statewide competition held in Orlando beginning in late February.
As in past years, the TBK8 team had a strong showing, taking second place in the state in the middle school division. Of the eight entries from Wharton that placed in the top ten in the high school division, one also made the top three.
Nathaniel Bostic and his wife Rebecca are co-advisors for TBK8’s chapter of TSA, which is a national organization made up of 250,000 middle and high school students in about 2,000 schools.
The Bostics say they will take 18 students to the TSA national competition, which will be held in June in Washington, D.C. They hope to be able to bring along the Wharton team, which is made up of a pair of the TBK8 TSA chapter’s alumni.
“It’s exciting for us to see our former students, now in ninth, tenth and eleventh grade,” says Nathaniel Bostic. “They’re coming back to work with our kids and mentor them, and also grow in their own projects.”
Find out more about the TSA chapter at TBK8 by visiting TBK8TSA.org.
Congratulations to the following students, all of whom placed in the top three in their respective categories:
TBK8 First-Place Finishers: Jake Dostal, Danielle Arrigio and Simon DuPriest for Bio Tech; Rajuta Kansara, Antra Sharma, Emily You and Sophie Tian for Children’s Stories; Riley Hall for Essays on Technology; Aubrey Glover, Sayeed Azam and Roman LaRock for Mechanical Engineering; Emily You and Sophie Tian, Technical Design.
TBK8 Second-Place Finishers: Aubrey Glover and Sayeed Azam for Challenging Technology Issues; Riley Hall and Ryan Hutchinson for Coding; Ashlynn Costello for Digital Photography; Alexis Cowles, Tyler McDowell, Abigail Welsh and Danielle Arrigio for Off the Grid.
TBK8 Third-Place Finishers: Ryan Hutchinson and Tyler Yee for Electrical Application; Sayeed Azam for Flight;
Nyasa Kumar, Danielle Arrigio, Kiara Torres and Arnav A. for Inventions and Innovations; Riley Hall, Julan Carvajal, Alonzo Reroma and Pranav Magaluru for Website Design.
Wharton Third-Place Finishers: Tim Norwood and Rachel Welsh, 3rd place, Structural Design.
LIBERTY SHINES AT FBLA:Students from Liberty Middle School (see photo, above) were award winners at the 2019 Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) State Leadership Conference, held in Orlando March 22-25.Â
Congratulations to Shreya Gullapalli (1st place, Business Etiquette), Uma Panchal (2nd, Business Etiquette), Amulya Ravipati (5th, Business Etiquette), John Madadha (3rd, Business Math and Financial Literacy), Destiny Nieves and Tanvi Chetal (4th, Community Service), Sai Aashrith Kossireddy (3rd, Elevator Speech), Kenzo Cogswell (3rd, Introduction to Business Communication), Keerthi Penumuchu (2nd, Keyboarding), Sofia Murrin (3rd, Keyboarding), Yana Kumar (4th, Keyboarding), Pavan Moturi (3rd, Multimedia & Website Design), Dante Boin (3rd, Spreadsheet) and Olivia Kurtz (4th, Spreadsheet).
Shreya Gullapalli, the school’s first-place finisher in Business Etiquette, will be recognized for her achievement at the Hillsborough County Public Schools School Board meeting in May. All of the winners named are eligible to attend FBLA’s National Leadership Conference in San Antonio, TX, this summer.
“We are really proud of all of our chapter representatives, because from 24 competitors, 13 placed at the state level. One of our members placed first in Business Etiquette and she is eligible to attend nationals,” said Sofia Murrin, Chapter President, “and our entire chapter was inspired to continue with FBLA in high school and beyond.”
Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda, Inc., is the largest career student business organization in the world, with more than 230,000 members.
With students throughout Hillsborough County now back to school for the 2018-19 school year the same day this issue is scheduled to arrive in your mailbox, there are many changes that make this school year different from last. Here are five things that are new since your students were on campus last spring:
Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office deputies went through intensive “active shooter” training this summer in preparation for the new school year. (HCSO Twitter)
1. School Security
In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting on Valentine’s Day of this year, a new state law requires armed security on every public school campus.
While the law has changed, it won’t appear much different from what’s already been in place on most New Tampa public school campuses.
Freedom and Wharton high schools, Benito and Liberty middle schools and Turner/Bartels K-8 school will continue to have a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) deputy or Tampa Police Department (TPD) officer on campus.
At our area’s six elementary schools, one TPD officer or HCSO deputy will be assigned to each school. Previously, one officer served multiple campuses.
While it is planned to have an armed school security officer at every elementary school, employed by Hillsborough County Public Schools, the school district says it will take time to hire and train the necessary personnel, so elementary school campuses will have law enforcement officers from the local agencies to “fill that temporary gap and ensure the safety of our schools,” according to a statement provided by the Hillsborough School District.
What may be different, though, is the fear felt by parents as they send their kids back to school.
Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) International is a national professional organization for educators that has surveyed attitudes toward public education every year since 1969. This year’s poll finds that one in three parents fear for their child’s physical safety at school. PDK describes that as, “a sharp increase from 2013, when just 12 percent said they were fearful.”
Wendy Arroyo, whose two children attend Wharton and Benito, says she believes the school campuses are safe but, in the back of her mind, “There’s always a little bit of fear that something might happen today,” she says. “Unfortunately, that’s the reality that we live in now.”
Local principals say their campuses are continually monitored for safety and improved as opportunities are recognized, with some improvements being provided by the district and some coming out of school budgets.
“We have always tried to secure our campus in every way, shape and form, from every angle,” says Benito principal John Sanders. He and other local principals say they continue to do that on an ongoing basis.
2. Bell Times
Every school in New Tampa has a new schedule this year. Elementary schools start at 7:40 a.m. and finish at 1:55 p.m., middle schools start at 9:25 a.m. and finish at 4:20 p.m., and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. and finish at 3:25 p.m.
The biggest change is at Turner/Bartels K-8 School, which starts at 7:40 a.m. and finishes at 2:35 p.m. this year.
Last year, Turner/Bartels’ school hours were 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“It’s a huge change for our families,” says principal Cindy Land. “It’s bittersweet. Parents are excited because their younger kids will be able to participate in after-school activities, but older kids are used to the later (start and end) times.”
Parents of students at all schools are making changes in their routines to accommodate the new schedules. Elementary and middle schools have before- and after-school care, called HOST (Hillsborough Out of School Time) to help working parents who need to drop off or pick up their children outside of their school’s hours.
“Drop off doesn’t happen until 9 a.m. now,” explains Benito principal Sanders. “HOST starts at 7 a.m., but if you’re not in HOST, you can’t walk in or be dropped off until 9 a.m.”
3. Newly Assigned Schools
A major boundary shift has happened, with students living in several New Tampa neighborhoods heading to different schools this fall. Students living in Cory Lake Isles and Arbor Greene who previously attended Pride Elementary have been reassigned to Hunter’s Green Elementary (HGE).
School records show that, as of the end of July, 250 students are now enrolled at HGE who were previously at Pride. Many students who were reassigned from Pride were given the opportunity to stay there using the school district’s “school choice” applications. The number of students who chose to do that will not be available until after school starts.
“People are very excited,” says HGE principal Gaye Holt. “It’s been a very positive transition.”
Meanwhile, residents of the Morgan Creek apartments neat I-75, who were previously assigned to HGE, have been reassigned to Clark, which is a couple of miles closer to Morgan Creek residents.
Residents of K-Bar Ranch and Addison Park apartments in Cross Creek have been moved from Heritage to Pride.
More than 550 students who were bused to Clark and HGE from the area surrounding the University of South Florida now attend schools in their own neighborhoods, which created space at both HGE and Clark to accept students from Pride and make room for the expected growth in K-Bar Ranch.
4. Fewer Buses, More Cars?
Expect to see a few less school buses on the roads in New Tampa for the 2018-19 school year, as many students have been reassigned to schools closer to their homes. Hillsborough County Schools doesn’t provide buses to students who live less than two miles from their assigned school.
Hunter’s Green has prepared for the change – with just four school buses on campus this year, compared to 10 last year – by doing some construction to accommodate the expected increase in car traffic and those students who will be walking and biking.
Drop-off and pick-up car line traffic will now enter HGE via Cross Creek Blvd. A new roadway circle that accommodates cars two-deep was constructed to aid in the lineup of traffic, especially for the afternoon pick-up line.
Designed to minimize traffic impacts along Cross Creek Blvd., Principal Gaye Holt says the new path is expected to accommodate 110 vehicles in the car line at once.
5. Wharton’s “New” Principal
A new principal who is a familiar face to many locals has taken the helm at Wharton High, which suffered some negative publicity last year about student safety at the school.
Mike Rowan was the principal at King High on N. 56th St. until he officially became the principal at Wharton on July 1.
Rowan is a resident of Pebble Creek and a parent of a student who graduated from Wharton this past spring. When the school first opened in 1997, becoming New Tampa’s first high school, Rowan was a social studies teacher and soccer coach. In 2006, he was named assistant principal for administration (APA) at Wharton. He served in that capacity for five years before being named the principal at King.
