The Monroe County Community School Corporation is finalizing plans to reopen in the fall.
A committee of faculty, staff, students and administrators is working on a draft that will be released for comment at Tuesday’s school board meeting.
Superintendent Judy DeMuth says plans will have to be flexible because there are more possible scenarios than the district could possibly anticipate.
“All these great minds are trying to put together a plan that really is going to be safe for our children and our teachers and our staff members to the best of our knowledge,” she says. “We recognize that until there’s a vaccine or until this thing is eradicated, we’re going to have to deal with it.”
The district will take feedback on the plan with the goal of releasing a final draft June 30.
DeMuth says somethings in the plan could change based on feedback and ongoing recommendations from the Monroe County Health Department.
School starts Aug. 5. The district is offering both an online and in-person option.
About 30 percent of parents responding to a survey from the Monroe County Community School Corporation expressed interest in an online learning option for the fall.
President of the Monroe County Education Association Paul Farmer says virtual learning will be much more structured in the fall than it was in the spring.
“We weren’t able to prepare for the spring, he says. “That was something that happened at the instant. There are teacher working over the summer, when they’re not even being paid to do that, getting classrooms ready to go.”
Farmer says while plans will have to remain flexible for when COVID-19 cases occur, teachers are trying to make plans now so that students will have some consistency in the fall.
He says some online classes will try to imitate what the structure would be like in-person. But for some classes, like food-science, that isn’t possible.
The school corporation hopes to have a sense of how many students will be learning online by early July.
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