Cindy DiNapoli stands amid the one-to-one devices that will be provided to students in the Jamestown Public Schools district this school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Cindy DiNapoli stood in the middle of a quiet, empty library at Jefferson Middle School.

Filling its center aisle were not carts of books ready to be placed back on the shelf — rather, filling the space were carts of iPads charging in anticipation of being given out to district students from across the city in a few short days.

“It’s a lot of work,” she said looking out from her station inside the library’s computer lab.

“But we will get it done.”

That “can-do” attitude has been the motto of late on Martin Road and through the Jamestown Public Schools district as it moves forward with its hybrid plan to reopen schools safely amid a global pandemic.

No more than 15 students are allowed in a classroom at any given time and desks are spaced out 6 feet apart in this Jefferson Middle School classroom. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Over the next week, DiNapoli and her colleagues will make sure each tablet is updated, charged and equipped with all the resources students will need to learn safely as the Jamestown Public Schools district moves forward with its hybrid plan to reopen its schools amid a global pandemic. Like most district staff, they’ve been working nonstop the past several weeks — now, they’re simply in a race against time.

“Everything has been on an incredibly compressed timeline,” Dr. Kevin Whitaker, superintendent, told The Post-Journal. “The things that we did initially to create the plan would normally take three months to a year and we did it essentially in two weeks or a month.”

At Jefferson, kids will be assigned into two cohorts. Based on those cohorts, students will also be assigned an entrance and exit door as well as a classroom, where they will stay for the duration of their morning school day from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

“When they leave at 12:30, the teachers will be eating lunch from 12:30 to 1 and then from 1 to 3 will be afternoon personal Zooming sessions, where you can provide interventions and do check on students that are remote that day,” Principal Leslie Melquist said. “Every day the teachers are constantly doing something all day long and then it’s fully remote learning on Fridays.”

She added: “Activities in the afternoon can vary. Students may have to complete Google classroom activities, watch pre-recorded lessons, teachers may do a check and connect with their remote learners that day, or personal Zooms to provide interventions for students who may be struggling or have questions (office hours).”

Signs like these are pictured around Jamestown Public Schools buildings. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Friday will also incorporate social-emotional learning as well, Melquist said, and counselors will be on-call virtually to provide support to students.

“Our counselors are making virtual Google classrooms for them so that the kids can, at any point in time, go check-in and say, ‘I need an appointment with my counselor,'” Melquist said. “They can go through this really cool animated classroom that the counselors made that can allow the kids to sign up for a one-on-one Zoom counseling session with their counselors because it’s not like they can leave.”

While students in fifth and sixth grades only have one classroom teacher no matter the year, students in seventh and eighth grade who have different teachers for different subjects and are used to going room-to-room will stay stationary: the teachers will be the ones moving from class-to-class.

“They’ll be rotating and all the extra desks are taken out so that desks are six feet apart,” Melquist said. “We’re not going to be using lockers, so their backpacks will go right on the back of their desks with all of their belongings. They come in and they go right to their room. They stay in there.”

There can be no more than 15 students in one room at one time — but Melquist said most cohorts are broken up into less than that.

Students will line up on the blue spray-painted marks outside of Jefferson Middle School ahead of their health screening and temperature check. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

“All of our AT students and all of our students in special education, our co-teaching students are all in the same cohort so they’re all grouped together based on their class needs,” she said.

Each morning, students will line up on blue stripes located outside each door. A hand sanitizing station will await them once inside the building as well as a check-in desk where one person will cross off each student’s name while another will conduct a health screening and temperature check.

Bathrooms will have a paraprofessional seated outside with charts to keep track of who goes in and out. The only time students will move in a group is during physical education class.

“Want to get the kids out for PE,” Melquist said. “As long as the weather is nice, we’ll bring them outside. We have a triple gym here, so we have plenty of room for when we need to go inside. We are very fortunate to have that. We’ll have the kids escorted. We’re going to be putting markings on the floor to show the kids how far apart they can be while walking down the hall.”

Melquist also discussed how students will be disciplined should social distancing measures be violated.

“We definitely would do that reteach as we would if it were any other behavior — a kid that’s putting his head down on his desk and refusing to do work,” she said. “It’s the same kind of thing. We’re always reteaching them that lesson piece. If a kid is still refusing, we do have the option at any point to working with the parents and then make the recommendation that this student goes full remote because the in-person learning is not working out.”

She added, “I’m hopeful that between us reinforcing what’s needed and necessary here and working with parents at home, that that won’t happen very often. If a student is on full-remote learning and they’re not being successful and they’re not doing what they need to do to continue with that, we do have the option to work with the parents to pull them into the hybrid model.”

Still, questions remain and district leaders and building principals have been getting their fair share of questions will classes due to begin in roughly a week.

“Generally, parents have been really good,” Whitaker said. “They’re struggling with the thing that we’re all struggling with: this is a brand new thing. This is a brand new thing for everybody. Back-to-school is usually regimented and very practiced and very planned out and this time, it’s all brand new for everyone.”

He also expects that there will be flexibility for at-home learning, which will be mostly at a teacher’s discretion.

“One of the things that we made sure that we did was that we allowed for the professional freedom for our professional teachers,” Whitaker said. “In the same way that your homework from one class and one teacher might be different in another class, that kind of afternoon session will be different based on the needs of that class and of that teacher.”

He added, “At the same time I won’t say ‘Everything will always happen within school hours,’ I also won’t rule out the fact that flexibility is there for parents, for kids, for families to get things done after hours.”

What’s impressed Whitaker — who has only been at the district’s helm for a mere 60 days — has been the will of the educators he’s working with.

“They really are trying to do the best that they can with kids; there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “We have a great group here who are being very creative and I can’t wait to see what that’s going to be.”