POST FALLS — An updated operational plan will be implemented in the Post Falls School District starting Monday.

This pilot program will move the remote learning day from Wednesdays to Fridays and have K-12 students in school in person Mondays through Thursdays; remove late-start Mondays; reconfigure classroom seating; and allow the school district to close individual schools or move them to hybrid learning when necessary rather than shift every school in the district when COVID outbreaks occur.

Superintendent Dena Naccarato said they want to try this plan "to see if our hypothesis works and we're quarantining fewer students" and to pilot this "because it may not work," in which case they'll move to other plans.

"What we're hearing from parents is the remote learning is extremely difficult for working families; they get home from work, and then they've got four hours of schoolwork" which was basically mandated by the Idaho State Board of Education for schools to receive funding, Naccarato said during a meeting of the school board Monday evening.

The turnaround time on remote learning days is a hardship on families, she said, but if it moves to Fridays, students and families will receive more time to dedicate to schoolwork. Wednesdays have been used for cleaning, but new equipment makes it possible to fog classrooms and sanitize each day rather than doing a deep clean on one day.

Moving remote learning from Wednesday to Friday will alleviate this stress for families, as well as teachers, who will still be able to have professional development and catch up students who need extra help.

Teaching in person and online has been stressful for teachers, and "is not a realistic ask," Naccarato said.

"People think that teachers should have this figured out just like that, and this is brand new for a lot of our teachers," she said. "The idea it's going to be perfect in the first year is an unfair bar."

This pilot version of the operational plan will reconfigure seating arrangements in classrooms to work toward reducing the number of quarantines associated with exposures.

"We have learned quite a bit from our two weeks in 'yellow,'" Naccarato said. "We at the central office knew that we would be quarantining students. I don't think that we had any idea how the configuration of a classroom could affect the number of students that quarantined."

When students are in rows, she said, they're surrounded by eight students who will have to quarantine when their classmate has a positive COVID test.

"We believe that by reconfiguring the classroom setup, so that students are no longer sitting in rows, but pairs or quads, it will limit the number of students we have to quarantine if one of those students tests positive for COVID."

Moving the desks into the new formations is an easy way to test this hypothesis, she said.

Naccarato said one thing this responds to is a lack of consistency in students' education right now.

Because this was a draft plan to be piloted, the school board did not hold a vote. Details will be sent to Post Falls families this week.