Springfield IL school board approves e-learning for emergency days
Springfield School District 186 will now be able to use e-learning for emergency days after the board of education gave its approval in a 6-0 vote Tuesday.
The vote was prompted after the district was forced to use five “emergency” days over the winter. Without an e-learning plan in place, the school year didn’t end until June 10, nearly a week after high school graduations.
Board members voted down a similar plan on Aug. 31 but attached an amendment to revisit the e-learning this year.
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Nobody spoke at a public hearing preceding Tuesday’s board meeting.
E-learning would be implemented on emergency days called by Springfield District 186 Superintendent Jennifer Gill unless there are extenuating circumstances, like widespread power outages.
The district’s nearly 13,000 students are equipped with their own laptops and hotspots.
Prior to this past school year, the district used 21 “emergency days” over the last 10 school years. In several of those years — 2011-12, 2015-16 and 2020-21 — the district did not use any of its five days, which the Illinois State Board of Education mandates it must build into the calendar.
Gill said e-learning will be different than remote learning, which was an all-day online direct instruction.
According to the draft plan, which now goes to the Regional Office of Education, students would do five hours of asynchronous learning a day. Asynchronous means a student goes at his or her own pace.
Teachers would be available for about two hours each day face-to-face and available all day for students’ questions, Gill said.
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“It’s going to be something we’ll have to work through this first year and understand what next steps we need to improve it in the future, but I do think it’s going to be different than actual remote learning was during the COVID-19 pandemic. ,” she added.
E-learning had the backing of 96% of some 350 Springfield Education Association members who took part in a survey on the subject in May, said union president Aaron Graves.
Board member Micah Miller of Subdistrict 2 was absent from Tuesday’s meeting but did send a letter of support for the e-learning plan, Gill said.
Contact Steven Spearie: 217-622-1788, [email protected], twitter.com/@StevenSpearie.