Hamden Schools Ready To Reopen, With Dragon Pride

Stickers with arrows dot the hallways of Hamden High School, signs hang down from the ceiling at every corner with arrows and small yellow and green dragons in the corner, and classrooms are set up with desks six feet apart. Now, the building is just missing students.

Principal Nadine Gannon and other administrators are eager to have them back.

Hamden High, like the rest of the district, is set to open this coming Tuesday, after the Board of Education voted to push reopening back a week. The district is going ahead with the hybrid model it pitched to the state in July, mixing days of in-person learning with remote learning.

Just a few days away from the long-awaited start date, the classrooms at the high school are mostly ready for students.

Thursday, Gannon, Assistant Principal Scott Trauner, and Superintendent Jody Goeler walked around the school talking about the upcoming reopening and pointing out the new layout. On the northern end of the building, a constant line of cars rolled past the building as parents and students picked up the laptops the school is providing to every student. On the southern end of the building, cars rolled by an entrance at a slower pace so staff could hand books to students who will be doing school entirely from home.

Hamden’s hybrid model will allow the district to bring its students to school without cramming any buildings. Since it is a hybrid model, not every student will come to school every day, and some will stay home and learn on Zoom.

At the high school, students will be divided into two cohorts, one with names starting with letters A‑K, the other with L‑Z names. One cohort will come to school Mondays and Tuesdays, while the other tunes into class on Zoom. They will then switch so the other cohort comes to school Wednesday and Thursday. Cohorts will come to school on alternate Fridays, so every student will be at school either two or three days a week.

The district anticipates that about 65 percent of high school students will come to school for in-person instruction, while the rest will do entirely remote school. With a total student body of about 1,600, that means on any given day there will only be around 500 or so students in the building.

Elementary schools will use a different model. One or two grade levels will stay home each day, so that every grade level comes to school four days a week and learns from home one day. As of right now, it seems that more elementary students will come for in-person school than high school students, with percentages ranging from 65 to 75 percent of students at the various schools. Students always have the option of switching from in-person to remote or vice versa, so those numbers may be fluid.

At all schools, the day will last five and a half hours.

Life at school will look very different than it did before. That’s a word Goeler has been repeating a lot lately. ​“Just different,” he said of this school year. ​“That’s the word I’m using mostly.”

After six months away from in-person school, Gannon said students want to return. She said she, too, is itching to have them back.

“We are eager and excited,” she said. ​“We need to see our kids.”

Clockwise, Counterclockwise, Up, Down

Throughout the school, small green dragon emblems surrounded by the words ​“dragon pride” pop out from signs displaying arrows and phrases like ​“stay safe!”

“Make sure you get the dragon pride in there,” Gannon told this reporter as she pointed to the signs. She was wearing a green mask with yellow and white stripes, a dragon on one cheek, and ​“Hamden dragons” on the other.

Every hallway in the school has a direction. On the first floor, the hallways all move in a clockwise direction around the central courtyard. On the second floor, they move counterclockwise, and on the third, clockwise again.

Stairwells have directions too. Gannon said she and maintenance staff walked around the school to determine which stairwells should go up, and which ones down. At the beginning of the day, she said, all stairs will be used to go up, and at the end of the day, students can use them all to go down.

In every classroom, desks are laid out six feet apart from each other. The high school aimed to have 12 – 15 desks in each room. In other schools throughout the district, rooms sometimes have more than that if they are larger, like at the Shepherd Glen or Ridge Hill Schools, which have open classrooms, Goeler said. In other cases, rooms have fewer. The main criterion for determining how many desks are in a room is whether they can all be spaced 6 feet apart, he said.

Students will eat lunch in one of three places: the cafeteria, the auditorium, or the lecture hall. Whitson’s, the district’s cafeteria contractor, will prepare all the food in the cafeteria and take some of it to the two other locations, where students will sit and eat. The school added an extra lunch period, meaning students will eat in five waves instead of four.

In the cafeteria, the desks were already set up Thursday. Seventy desks with attached chairs were spaced out in neat rows throughout the light-filled room.

Lunch desks had not yet been set up in the lecture hall, and were waiting outside in the hallway. Inside, tables were piled high with laptops that the school was in the midst of distributing to students.

Next to the doors of some offices, signs displayed the maximum occupancy of the room. The sign outside the Washburn House displayed a red ​“3.”

“So, no more than three students at a time can get in trouble,” Trauner joked as he pointed it out.

Hamden chose a hybrid model partly because of the flexibility it affords students and the district. Students can opt to change to fully remote learning if they want, or they can come back to school if they’ve been away. If there is an outbreak in the area or in the district, the model allows schools to move to a remote model immediately.

The district is also looking into ways of screening every student to assess their social-emotional wellbeing. Trauner, who is helping plan the screening, said the district does not know yet what mechanism it will use to do so.

Gannon said she thinks students will be on board with the precautions. ​“They want to be here. I’m very confident that they are going to support our safety precautions,” she said.

She said she and her staff are eagerly awaiting Tuesday. She’s thinking of some welcoming surprise for students when they come to school for the first time in half a year. For example, she might… well, you’ll have to wait until Tuesday.

Read the district’s full reopening plan here.