 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise Vs and generous donations from viewers like you. Hello and welcome to the Amherst Weekly Report. I'm Claire Healy and this week we'll be talking about Amherst schools, local businesses, and UMass Amherst deficit. First, the Amherst-Pellum Regional School District will go entirely online until at least October 1st, according to revised plan. Students are set to start remotely beginning on September 16th. This is a shift from a previous plan that had younger students pre-K through first grade in Amherst and pre-K to second grade in Pellum coming in person to school. It also allowed for beginner English language learners, students with limited or interrupted formal education, students in special education programs, and houseless students to attend in person. A group has formed called Amherst Responsible People for Safe Return to School or ARPS United who opposes the revised all online plan. They pointed to the low transmission rate in Amherst to argue that in-person learning is feasible and advocate that scientific data be used in making decisions. On a website created by the group, they said that, quote, distance learning harms the future of our students and continues systematic racism. We spoke with Superintendent Michael Morris about the revised plan and the process of deciding to implement it. We'll be all remote for all of our students. And then on October 1st, the current plan would be that our what we would call phase one students, which are generally the students who have less access to distance learning, our youngest students, our students with intensive special needs, our students who do not have permanent residence, and some of our students who are SLIFE. So the students with limited or interrupted schooling and they also beginner ELL students would return if they so choose. All students this year have the option of staying remote or coming into person when they're when we're able or we're ready for them. That is contingent on continued agreements with our bargaining units, our unions, and we continue to work at that multiple times a week to see if we can hammer out agreements for that to move forward. It gives us time to give some more assurances to staff members in the community about the safety of our spaces. And so we are actively working on that. We've done a lot of work on it all summer, but having independent people come in to test our spaces to give us information as well as recommendations is a critical component. So we want to work in concert with our bargaining units to move forward and support students and staff in all ways. He described feedback from the community where such a sensitive and personal issue leads to everyone having their own opinion and encouraged feedback. Everyone's personal situation in the era of COVID is really different. And I think that we're seeing that a lot. Whether it's families who live with someone who's autoimmune or autoimmune themselves in terms of students or families or the impact for students who medically can't wear a mask and how much that limits their their life right now. You know, there are some families with means who can find ways to, you know, get students together and hire a teacher and things like that. We haven't seen as much here as we is in Eastern Massachusetts or other states. But I think existing inequities and disparities in general have been expanded in the time of COVID. And so we're highly conscious of that. That it is very experiential and it's very personal. And so I think what what we've tried to do is try to work with people where they are, understand that everyone's situation is different and try to provide the best education we can for the kids. He also described various plans in the school district to help students, including Wi-Fi access and a project where younger students are provided with their own masks to decorate. I think if people have ideas about how to improve what we're doing, they should be sure to to share them with us. I'll give you two examples. So we did two in-person town halls. We did a bunch of virtual town halls for fives and like that. But we did two in-person ones and we did them in high-density housing areas. And in both of them, we heard really good ideas that we've taken on. So one of them was from a family who said in terms of distance learning, my children really need to have headphones because I have multiple children. My home is not very large. They're different grade levels. And if they're going to be hearing each other's teacher and students talking all the time, it's going to be really distracting. It was a great idea. So we bought, I think, 700 headphones. And you know, we're going to specifically look at families who have subsidized meals. So we're giving them to the folks who need them the most. And so I think when we have tangible ideas like that, we're really good at saying that's a great idea and implementing them. So I think for anyone watching this, if there are ideas that we can implement that's going to that will make a difference for children in our community, please send them our way. My email address is morsem. So m-r-r-i-s-m at a-r-p-s.org. If it's something that's more of a policy level, you can certainly share it at school committee to show school committee, which is school committee one word at rfs.org. If you're a parent and you think, oh, it's specific to a school, please be in touch with teacher or the principals. They can get the idea to me if it's something that, you know, they feel like will really help and is feasible. So really, any of the above either teachers, principals, myself, I'm always happy to get ideas if it's something at a larger level, certainly the school committee can be included and, you know, we'd love to hear the ideas and again, we're dedicated to improvement and that helps us improve. Teachers aren't the only educators adapting to new challenges. Professors of the surrounding colleges have been working to implement education plans that work for their students. Some professors have been doing a flipped learning style of prerecorded lectures and live discussions or reflections. Others have reduced the number of meetings to guard against Zoom fatigue. We spoke with the UMass professor, Alistair Roberts, about what this has been like for him so far. Here's what he said. More advanced planning when you're doing a course in this format because you sort of want to think about how the machinery is going to work throughout the entire semester. This is a large class too, it's got 162 students in it. So it's important to make sure that the design is sort of clean and simple and predictable so that everybody is staying on the same path throughout the whole course. So that basically meant that there was a lot of sort of upfront planning in terms of the course design and getting all the components, the lectures, the quizzes, the assignments sort of all structured beforehand. We've got 13 weeks, so I've got 13 prerecorded lectures. I'm doing a live version of the lecture as well, but I wanted to have a backup in case there were individuals who had difficulty getting to a synchronous session. There's a asynchronous, as we call it, component available. It's basically 90% of what the lecture would be. To some degree it's also about kind of being open, listening for feedback, and doing course corrections, and I'm expecting we'll do that as we go along. I mean one of the things we're learning, not just in this course but in other contexts, is that there's certain advantages to some of the things we're doing. The loss of face-to-face contact, the in-person contact, that's important. It's sort of, to some degree it's like an intangible, you know, you just want to be with other people. But on the other hand, it's also sometimes easier to connect with students this way, you know, that they don't have to find your office. We can connect pretty easily through Zoom. It's easier to bring speakers in, especially off-campus speakers, and we can connect folks who might otherwise be hard to connect. And sometimes too, for example, we had a speaker in yesterday. It's hard to explain this, but I think the conversation is a little flatter in the sense that it's less hierarchical, because, you know, the speaker's there, they're speaking from their own living room or their kitchen, they're not up on a stage, and there's questions coming through in the chat box. So the format is a little more egalitarian and conversational than it would be otherwise. One of the legacies of this is that we'll have more versatility in the way in which we teach. Sometimes we'll do it the classic way, sometimes we'll use features of this, just where it actually adds value. In first year, a big chunk of it is about finding your way around, right, sort of figuring out how everything works. And I don't know whether for the incoming class, working that out is a little more complicated, because you're not physically on site, and you're not connecting as much as you would with other students who are in the same predicament, you know, because if you were actually here, you'd be bumping into folks who are also trying to figure it out all the time. I mean, this is a tough moment. It's a challenging moment, but it's going to pass, you know, and there will be frustrations, but I think the key thing is that we just work together, figure out the essentials of what need to get done, and do the best we can. I think circumstances are going to improve substantially in 2021. We'll get through this, and just make sure we're in a great place to take advantage of all the opportunities that are going to come along when conditions improve next year. Next, COVID-19 has caused a lot of stores to reconsider their business models to adjust to the social distance safety requirements recommended by the CDC. Along with more rigorous cleaning and increased PPE for employees and customers, businesses that previously relied on close contact in-person customer service have to make changes such as rerouting foot traffic, eliminating tables, and reducing capacity to compensate for the danger that person to person contact brings. Some businesses have seen menu reductions, eliminating items that don't sell as well to reduce food and capital waste, while others have expanded their offerings as an essential part of the community. We spoke with Nick Seaman, owner of the Black Sheep Deli in Amherst, which has been in business since 1986 to ask what business was like when COVID-19 hit and how they've adjusted to the ever-changing health climate. Well, when COVID-19 first hit, it was a big hit for us because UMass, Amherst College, I guess Hampshire College, you know, decided to close down and send everybody home around spring break time. And we weren't sure at beginning listening to them if they really were going to bring people back after spring break, but then when it became clear they weren't, we had to go into a different mode. So we desperately tried to stay open for a few weeks after that. And then the kind of destroy the book that camels back for us was when UMass decided not to open for summer school. So when that wasn't going to happen, we just said we're closing. So at the end of March we closed and we were closed for four and a half months until August 5th. I made the decision on my own without any input from the town or the university that I didn't want to open my doors. So we just do takeout and delivery. So I felt like we needed to do something different. So we looked around town and decided that the town did not have a market. And I wanted to help keep any trips that could possibly make to route nine to the big box stores and wait in line to the big box stores. So we've added up downtown market. And right now it's only online, but we're getting ready to consider opening the doors and setting up the market inside for meats and fish and produce and dry goods and baked goods so that people can get what they want. In more COVID news, the town of Amherst and UMass Amherst held a virtual community forum to discuss joint UMass town efforts to mitigate spread of COVID. UMass Amherst and town of Amherst officials discussed current developments and answered questions about the effort to halt the spread of COVID-19 both on the UMass campus and in the greater Amherst community. The forum discussed topics covering testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine protocols, as well as public health messaging to the community, and the UMass Amherst agreement. Finally, UMass announced that it will furlough 850 employees. On August 27th, UMass Amherst Chancellor Subhaswamy announced in a letter that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a projected $168.6 million loss in the campus' operating budget. The numbers break out to a $67.4 million loss in housing and dining, $30.6 million decrease in tuition revenue, and a $20.9 million loss in other revenues including grant and contract overhead income, among other losses and expenditures attributed to COVID-19. To offset these losses, UMass Amherst initiated a hiring freeze and an early retirement program, which eliminated around 500 positions without furloughs, saving $120.8 million. However, this did not prevent the furlough of 850 staff, including dining hall workers and residence hall operations staff beginning September 13th. Subhaswamy says in his letter that permanent layoffs are expected in the coming weeks, and that they are continuing conversations with staff labor unions, prioritizing temporary reductions in hours and furloughs, which are expected to affect an additional 450 campus employees. These cuts to personnel leave UMass Amherst with a remaining deficit of $20.3 million. That's all for the news. This has been the Amherst Weekly Report from Amherst Media. I'm Claire Healy, and we'll see you again at the same time next week.