Leaders of the Little Rock School District and the city's medical centers are exploring ways in which school district employees who volunteer can provide child care and education programs for the the children of workers in medical fields.
One early version of such a partnership will start next Monday, when as many as a dozen Little Rock district employees -- state-licensed educators and support staff members -- will report to Arkansas Children's Hospital to work with the children of hospital employees, school district Superintendent Mike Poore said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Poore said, talks are underway to determine whether one or more school district campuses -- currently empty of students -- can be used as child care and education centers for children whose parents are employed in the medical fields and may be caught up in the diagnosing and treatment of swelling numbers of coronavirus patients.
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Ensuring that a program could be operated safely for the children and the adults is a priority in the planning, Poore said in an interview Tuesday.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson in March directed that school buildings statewide be closed to in-person instruction and that groups of no more than 10 be allowed to congregate anywhere as a way to slow the spread of covid-19. Schools are now closed at least through April 17. The state's 479,000 public school students are supposed to be doing their school work at their homes using paper packets of lessons or online lessons, conferring with their teachers either on the phone or by email and other digital means.
Poore in recent days has broached with leaders of other Central Arkansas school systems the idea of using schools and school employees to help health care workers care for their young children. And the service has been a topic of discussion for the city's Covid-19 Task Force that is led by Dean Kumpuris, a physician and member of the Little Rock Board of Directors.
The superintendent said he learned of a similar service in South Korea and raised the idea with leaders at Children's Hospital who also had been contemplating such a program.
The initiative, regardless of how it may or may not expand in Central Arkansas, won't be the first in the state.
Already, the Bentonville School District in Northwest Arkansas is operating three campuses for about 45 children -- from infants to sixth graders -- of front-line medical service providers.
Debbie Jones, superintendent of the Bentonville School District and a former assistant commissioner in the Arkansas Department of Education, heard the governor's early hesitation to close all schools in part because health care workers needed to have their children at school while they worked to treat a swelling number of covid-19 patients.
When closing the school buildings became inevitable, Jones saw the need for child care for medical families and developed the its program, said Leslee Wright, a spokeswoman for the district.
The Bentonville district kicked off its program on Monday, Wright said.
For a child to qualify for that program, at least one parent must be either an emergency first responder such as a firefighter or emergency medical technician, or be a health care provider such as a doctor, nurse or pharmacist, Wright said.
Infants through age 2 are at one school site and toddlers are at another -- and both sites are operated by accredited early childhood professionals.
Kindergarten through sixth graders are at the third site, which is operated by state-licensed Bentonville teachers. Those are teachers, Wright said, who would otherwise have a relatively light job assignment during this period when public schools are closed to in-school instruction.
The program hours are from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to accommodate the different work hours of the health care-providing parents. Bentonville district employees work in four-hour shifts at the sites.
The participating teachers include some who are middle and high school educators as well as elementary school faculty members, Wright said. The elementary pupils, like their peers statewide, spend time in the program doing their assigned academic work.
Multiple steps are being taken to protect children and adults in the program from exposure to covid-19, Wright said.
That starts at the front door with temperature-taking before entering the building.
No classroom has more than a total of 10 people in it, counting children and adults. Meals -- breakfast, lunch and a snack -- are served in the classrooms and not to a large group in a cafeteria, Wright said.
Intensive cleaning of the sites is done in the evenings as well as during the day.
The district does charge a fee to parents for the two groups of preschool-aged children, Wright said, but there is no fee for the school-aged children.
So far, the Little Rock district has no final agreements with hospitals other than Children's Hospital, Poore said Tuesday.
The day camp program there will be open 12 to 13 hours a day. Four support-staff employees from the district -- such as classroom aides -- will work in the mornings, and another four will work in the afternoons. Two of three educators will be on hand for part of the day to guide children in doing their academic lessons, relieving the parents of much of that responsibility before or after their workday.
The district staff is being asked to commit to at least a two-week stint at the hospital. The participating teachers won't be those who have direct responsibility for a classroom of students, but rather will be content specialists and others.
While the Bentonville program is for families in that district, Poore said the Little Rock hospitals attract employees with children in multiple public and private school systems and that all of those parents have the need for support for their children, which has to be taken into account in the design of a care and education program.
"Expanding it is not a given," Poore said about the service, noting that there is angst in the city about spreading the virus if social distancing of at least 6 feet can't be maintained in a program.
"Neither group wants to do anything that endangers people. Hospital people want a sense of confidence that when they have their child at a day camp at one of our facilities, they want to know if the environment is as pristine as humanly possible," he said. "On the other side, if we are going to have a day camp with kids coming in, our staff is not going to go work that unless it is a pristine environment."
All parties have the same goal, he said, but the steps to achieving that target have not all been worked out.
"We have not gotten to the specificity yet of what will be the standards for ... cleanliness and sanitizing. We haven't determined any sites. We have not determined student drop-off spots or staffing needs. We have to nail down the actual number of children to be served and then decide how do we properly social distance. That has to be a joint effort between the school district and the hospital.
"We want to support the hospital community, but we don't want to do anything that endangers anybody," he said.
Poore said real work will be needed to accomplish what has been a proven initiative in other places. He said a key point in any model in Central Arkansas will be allowing district staff members to volunteer for any program.
Metro on 04/01/2020