Students are set to return to high school buildings Thursday, but many of them will be learning virtually, even when they’re in the classroom.

“Thousands of high school students will not be receiving in-person instruction Thursday, they will not. What they will be receiving is what I call supervised remote instruction,” City Councilman Mark Treyger said.

Tottenville High School's principal told parents this weekend the school would not have enough teachers to provide in-person teaching to blended learning students, and instead would offer “supervision and support” while students bring their laptops to school and learn virtually. 

Treyger, chair of the Education Committee and a former high school teacher, said many high schools are in the same boat due to the more complicated scheduling involved.

“If their chemistry teachers are all out with a medical accommodation working from home, you can’t just put a history teacher to teach chemistry class. You need to have licensed science teachers to teach that class. There’s no big, infinite pool out there of chemistry subs in the school system, so that's why high schools are definitely facing the brunt of the staffing shortages," Treyger said.

Teachers in elementary school just need a general license, he noted, making it easier to shift them around to fill in for teachers who may not be able to work in the building.

At highly competitive Stuyvesant High School, virtual learning was the plan all along. On days they attend in person, students will be assigned seats in large areas like the auditorium, and they’ll log on to live instruction with classmates, including those who are fully remote.

“Right now, staff members are each teaching from their own separate classrooms. We have a lot of teachers who can’t even come to school,” said Julian Giordano, a senior and the school’s student union president.

The best part of the plan, he said, is it guarantees all students interact with their teachers, live, every day.

“We get to have synchronous instruction for every single one of our classes, every single day, regardless of what model we are in,” he said.

The plan also allowed the school to mostly maintain its wide course catalog, since teachers didn’t need to be shuffled around to cover in-person classes for others who were working from home.

“This allowed us to preserve that, and it also allowed us to keep all of our teachers on our staff without having to deal with a lot of the staffing issues a lot of other schools are facing,” he said.

While in-person students will be in separate classrooms than their teachers, they will have access to office hours and counselors, be able to get meals and use school technology. For some, it’s just important to be back in school.

“There is something really meaningful about being in the school building, it’s intangible but there’s a lot of students who just miss being in the building,” Giordano said.