Published July 26, 2019
By MARK SARDELLA
WAKEFIELD — The Learn Anywhere program that allows students and teachers to work from home on snow days and avoid making up school days at the end of the year may be coming to an end.
School Superintendent Douglas Lyons told the School Committee this week that the state Department of Education will allow the arrangement to remain in place for the coming school year, but after that it must be discontinued. He remained hopeful, however, that the DOE could change its mind.
Lyons said that he received a memorandum from the DOE at the end of June stating that after the 2019-2020 school year, all alternative learning days must be discontinued state wide, which includes districts like Wakefield doing learn at home assignments on snow days.
Lyons said that there was such a range in implementation plans submitted by school districts for alternative learning on snow days that the DOE felt that they couldn’t control it all, so their response was to discontinue such programs outright. Lyons said that he was disappointed because he felt that the DOE could have imposed any criteria or guidelines that it wanted to insure that equitable service is provided to all student populations, including special education students.
“We felt like we were planning for this,” Lyons said, noting that Wakefield’s Learn Anywhere Advisory Committee was actively working to address these issues. “We had plans for compensatory services,” he said, “but other communities didn’t.” In addition, Lyons noted, Wakefield had been invited by the DOE to be part of an advisory group to guide the state and local districts on how to develop plans for alternative learning programs for snow days.
School Committee member Chris Callanan asked Lyons if he thought the DOE might reconsider its decision.
Lyons said that he thought there was a good possibility that the decision will be reconsidered. He speculated that if this announcement had been made during the school year instead of the summer, the DOE would have gotten a lot more pushback from teachers and parents. He said that he felt that Learn Anywhere type programs are the way of the future.
School Committee member Aimee Purcell said that while she had not been the biggest fan of the Learn Anywhere program for a number of reasons, she was disappointed with the DOE’s blanket decision because Wakefield had invested so much work into it.
“We were on the path to having the system work,” she said, although there were still holes with respect to special education students. She said that the state could have limited the number of alternative learning days, after which snow days must be made up.
Lyons agreed that the state could have set a limit on the number of Learn Anywhere days, instead of scuttling the program altogether. He said that he didn’t think the conversation was over. He stressed that Learn Anywhere will continue through the coming school year and he expects the conversation over its long-term future to heat up again in the fall.
