Montague Elementary School in Siskiyou County opens with in-person classes

Montague Elementary School opened last week, with students inside classrooms. Matt Dustan, Principal and Superintendent, talks about how it’s going so far.

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Montague elementary school opened last week with students inside classrooms, matt, dustin principal, and superintendent of montague elementary joins us now.

Thanks for much for being with us.

Absolutely.

Thank you for having us.

So can you describe what your program is so far and how many kids you have in and out of your school on a daily basis?

Yeah, so montague elementary is one of several sisky county elementary schools.

That's both a district and a single site school.

We have about 170 students enrolled right now and, um, taking data from our parents and from our staff, we decided that we wanted to be on campus as often as possible.

So monday through friday, our students are here from eight in the morning till 1145 on a partial day.

Um, they're eating yeah.

In their classrooms and staying with, um, their groups, but we're getting five days of instruction in and so far, we're really happy with the results.

So i think a lot of parents would love to have that concept if it was safe and work.

So what are you doing to make sure, hey, your kids coming into school are safe and then how are you making sure they aren't transmitting the virus once they leave your school?

Absolutely.

So we work really closely with the cisco county, um, department of health and the cisco department, uh, county department of education to make sure that we're meeting all of our county and state guidelines and the students are being held screened on the way and every day.

Of course, we're all wearing masks and practicing social distancing.

Um, and then from there, the kids are staying in a small cohort with only their classmates each day, so that if we do have an incident on campus, it'll be easy to, um, find out where it came from, where it's going and then take, um, actions working in concert with our county department of health.

I know initially sometimes smaller districts were challenged by even more so than the large districts, trying to adjust to the new, online learning reality.

How have you been able to do that for your students?

That may be either school, part time or learning from home all the time.

It's, it's been very difficult here in rural sisky county.

Um, a lot of our parents don't have access to wifi, even with a hotspot, you know, for that to work, we have to have cell phone service and a lot of our families don't have cell phone service.

So we just asked our parent, our, um, teachers and staff to be very flexible with parents in terms of how they're meeting their needs.

Um, for those that can't meet online every day, we're reaching out in other ways to provide work.

Um, we're giving our teachers time to meet their needs in the afternoon.

When our other students go home, our distance learners become engaged online with our teachers who are either teaching synchronously online through the internet, or at times through, um, paper and pencil work, if needed.

What do you think larger districts can learn from your model and what do you think they can't duplicate simply because you're so much smaller than they might be.

You know, it's difficult.

I've worked in larger districts in the county.

We talk with them often.

And i think, think that a lot of the things that work for small rural schools just don't and can't work for big schools.

And it's one of the advantages that we have being over the hill from y rica and larger areas in siskiyou county is that we can make it work because we have few enough students and enough staff.

Um, to keep these small cohorts working and to stay safe during the day and for larger districts, i know that they're doing the best with the model that they're going to employ, but like i say, we're happy to work in a small rural school right now.

So how do you go, how are we going to gate success two or three months out?

Do you think that as this model goes forward, you'll be able to keep those kids and staff members safe and healthy.

That's the hope, you know, we keep an eye every day on our county statistics and we follow them carefully.

We try to follow.

I'm wearing the county.

We can expect to have problems. our county department of health, um, is in communication daily, uh, with us in terms of the trends that we're looking at.

I think that we will measure our success by just staying here and staying healthy, hopefully weathering the storm.

But if we do have a need to take action, we're ready to transition to at 100% distance learning and all those plants are already prepared.

My dustin principal and