March 4, 2021
WASHINGTON – Educators across the state Thursday were calling Gov. Doug Ducey’s surprise back-to-school order disruptive, challenging and frustrating, a last-minute complication to reopening plans that many schools already had in the works.
School officials, from the state level on down, said they were given little notice before Ducey’s announcement on Wednesday and are now scrambling to properly prepare classrooms for the return of teachers and students less than two weeks away.
“It really is a challenge for schools that had spent time planning and preparing,” said Richie Taylor, an Arizona Department of Education spokesperson. “Some of the big districts in central Phoenix had already made plans to return to in-person and had readied their staff and made operational plans around that, with slightly different dates.”
The Glendale Elementary School District is tentatively planning to close or repurpose up to five schools by the end of the 2022-23 school year.
The governing board read written comments and concerns from parents and faculty members during its meeting on Feb. 4. It also heard a two-phase timeline of closing, repurposing or changing the boundaries for schools.
Phase one of the proposed closures will be during the 2021-22 school year.
The board members said Isaac E. Imes and Melvin E. Sine elementary schools should close during phase one. Students from Imes would be reassigned to either Glenn F. Burton, Glendale Landmark or Harold W. Smith. Sine students would go to either Burton or Horizon elementary schools.
Meanwhile, a board meeting last week set the stage for potential permanent closures of multiple Glendale schools.
Due to falling enrollment, the Glendale Elementary School District Governing Board outlined proposed closures of five of the districtâs 17 schools in two phases.
The first phase would close Melvin E. Sine and Isaac E. Imes schools before the 2021-22 school year, with Coyote Ridge, Desert Garden and Bicentennial North potentially closing the following school year.
Facing an $11 million-plus budget deficit, âGESD will ensure financial solvency by providing the community a multi-year process of reorganizing boundaries and repurposing schools by June 2021,â according to a presentation at the Jan. 28 meeting.
While Peoria Unified and Deer Valley school districts are giving students the option of online or in-classroom learning, Glendale Elementary School District is keeping its classrooms closed.
On Thursday, Jan. 21, after Maricopa County updated its school metrics site, GESD Superintendent Cindy Segotta-Jones posted a message notifying families district classrooms would remain closed.
âTo ensure the safety of all, GESD will continue in a virtual model and monitor all data to determine when it is safe to return,â she wrote. She noted district ZIP codes âshow extremely high positivity rates pertaining to COVID-19.â
The data showed the communities surrounding GESD schools had more than 900 new cases per 100,000 population over the last week.
As in emergency powers, election legislation and education funding.
And the session will get off to a quick start as one of the first act of lawmakers will be to determine whether it s time to finally pull the plug on the state of emergency that Gov. Doug Ducey declared 10 months ago, an action, if it gets a majority vote, the governor cannot veto.
Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, already has the language crafted.
Her measure, SCR 1001, seeks to take advantage of a provision in the law that gave Ducey the power to unilaterally declare an emergency in the first place. It says the emergency ends when the governor says it does or when a majority of legislators vote to say its over.