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Update on the School Situation
There really isn’t one. At least not yet.
Yesterday our Governor announced that the decisions on start dates will be left up to the individual school districts. He had previously said that August 17th was the date for in-person schooling to begin. He now says that opening schools for in-person instruction will be based on benchmarks set by the state Department of Health Services.
What are those benchmarks? No one knows. They haven’t been released yet, and there was no indication given as to when they would be.
Fortunately, my son’s school district had already decided to begin with online instruction on August 6th, which would have been our normal first day of school. They indicated that they would begin with online instruction, and then switch to in-person when able, but they gave the option of doing the first quarter entirely online even if in-person classes begin before that ends.
My son is in high school. As such, my husband and I presented the options to him and asked for his input as to what he wanted to do. As a family, we decided that the best course of action for us is to have him do the entire first quarter online, for continuity’s sake. Also, that will give us, and the school district, time to figure out what exactly in-person school is going to look like. He would then (maybe) go for in-person instruction beginning with the second quarter, which starts on October 19th. I am hopeful that by that time the district will have a good handle on how to navigate this new territory.
Then again, with the way things are going, we might not even be able to go back in person on October 19th.
Welcome to life during Covid-19.
