On Line Education

What

On Line Education

When

5/11/2020

April 7, 2020

On Monday afternoon, the Idaho State Board of Education (SBOE) made a motion that was unanimously supported directing school districts and charter schools to extend the “soft closure” through the end of their calendar year. For Nampa School District, this means our buildings will remain closed to students until at least May 31 (the remainder of our school year).

They did include a caveat with the motion, which would allow local districts or charter schools to reopen to students if the following conditions were met:

All social distancing limitations have been removed.
All key requirements or benchmarks developed by local health districts and approved by the state board have been met. These benchmarks were not approved in this meeting but will be considered next Monday at the SBOE meeting.
As a reminder, during a soft closure, districts and charters are required to continue to provide essential services like food service and instruction to all students.

What does this action mean for the Nampa School District?

First of all, it means we will continue to offer instruction as we currently are doing, using virtual or remote learning methodology. We also will continue to offer meal service to our students using specific school sites as a serving base and busing routes to extend our service area. To find the route information for our food service, please refer to https://bit.ly/3aPdpUW. All students between the ages of 1 and 18 are eligible to receive these meals.

The state board also gave school districts and charter schools flexibility in 3 additional areas:

We will NOT be testing students in grades K-3 with the Idaho Reading Indicator (IRI) this year.
Seniors will NOT be required to take and pass the Idaho civics exam. For Nampa School District students, demonstrating proficiency in their government course will suffice.
Finally, in this last quarter, our high school students are likely NOT to meet the minimum 60 hours of instruction requirement for each credit hour. The SBOE has waived this requirement if the student meets other requirements for the course and is only short a total of 60 hours of seat time in the course.
Previously, the SBOE suspended the requirement for seniors and juniors to take the SAT for this school year. The State Department of Education is working on ways to support students financially who still want or need to take this college entrance exam in the next few months. In addition, the SBOE suspended the requirement for districts and charters to participate in ISAT this spring. The state board previously also temporarily suspended the senior project as a requirement for graduation.

The Board of Trustees of the Nampa School District will still need to consider suspending our policies related to graduation requirements around the senior project, college entrance exams and the civics exam. This is an action topic for their board meeting on Tuesday, April 14.

Athletics and activities are under the direction of the Idaho High School Activities Commission. We would expect a new decision from the IHSSA as soon as they convene their board to consider the decision of the SBOE. We also are currently considering our options for summer school sessions.

Unfortunately, we feel that with this extension from the SBOE, we need to officially cancel our spring dances, including prom, for this year. We know that this is disappointing for many of our students. But at this time, we do not feel that we can provide a safe environment for our students.

The Nampa School District is committed to pursuing creative ways to have our graduation ceremonies. To this end we will be collecting input and ideas from our seniors and their families. Please look for a survey later this week. We are hoping to be able to provide clear information and details about graduations by the end of this month.

Thank you for your partnership in this endeavor of online/remote learning. NSD is committed to serving students for the remainder of our school year.