Belleville 118 will start school year with remote learning only thanks to COVID-19

Belleville School District 118 will return to remote learning this fall, starting Aug. 20.

Teachers will report to their empty classrooms and prepare daily lessons for their students who will remain at home.

Superintendent Ryan Boike notified families of the decision to make lessons web-based only in an email Monday, 10 days after the district shared a drafted plan on its website that included in-person learning. With COVID-19 cases spiking in the metro-east, though, Boike said there were a lot of scenarios discussed where it made more sense to start the school year by closing classrooms to students.

“For a district our size, with the intricacies of our elementary and middle school buildings, it doesn’t allow any margin of error,” Boike said. “There were just continuing to be greater and greater factors that pointed toward our best bet being remote learning.”

Belleville 118 has 11 buildings and more than 3,800 students, making it the largest K-8 district to feed into Belleville Township High School District 201, which will be using a hybrid schedule this fall with in-person and remote components.

The plan is to start with remote learning for the first nine weeks and regularly reassessing local coronavirus data. Boike said he’d hope to give families three or four weeks notice before returning to in-person learning.

“The situation is fluid,” he said. “We’re hoping we can be back with our kids to start the second quarter, depending on what happens in our community with positive rates and updated guidance.”

Before announcing that all students would start remotely, families still had the option to choose remote learning for their students when they registered for the year. Boike said close to 50% of the students registered had opted for remote learning.

In the spring, Illinois districts were told March 13 that students wouldn’t be coming back, giving educators a tight timeframe to switch to remote learning. For the fall, Boike said remote learning would be “much more robust” and effective.

Belleville 118 has a Chromebook laptop computer available for each of its students. Staff were going through devices this week to prepared them for students who need one, Boike said. The district also will provide internet access.

Students will have five hours of “virtual school,” according to the email sent to families. That will include at least two and a half hours of live teaching and interaction with teachers and peers.

The full remote learning plan will be posted Thursday, Boike said.

“I hate this. I hate that we’re not starting the year with our kiddos in our buildings,” he said. “Coming back to school is supposed to be exciting.”

Other metro-east school districts have released hybrid plans for the fall semester that involved staggered scheduling and a blend of both remote and in-person instruction.

The East St. Louis District 189 Board on Friday voted to go along with a recommendation by Superintendent Arthur Culver to suspend in-person classes and offer remote learning only for the first quarter of the new school year.

This story was originally published July 28, 2020 at 1:06 PM.