South Pike principals and department heads told board members Thursday about their efforts to prepare for the coming school year, with precautions to try to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.
Those preparations across the district included professional development on precautionary procedures, temperature checks outside the school buildings when students arrive, serving “grab-and-go” lunches for students to eat in classrooms, and keeping students who would otherwise change classrooms through the day in the same room while teachers rotate through classrooms with their materials on carts.
Each room will have a cleaning log, so custodial staff can note when each room is cleaned. The district has some misting machines to spray sanitizer — composed of hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals — in classrooms, and is looking to buy more.
The ability to socially distance students is expected to be difficult only at Eva Gordon lower and upper elementary schools, where student counts and classroom sizes don’t mesh well.
“Our classrooms are arranged to spread the desks out as much as possible, but it’s not 6 feet,” said lower elementary principal Kim Daniels. “We’ve still got 20 in a classroom, even with some students going virtual. We maybe have 3 or 4 feet, and sneeze guards between them.”
Upper elementary principal Geneva Holmes said procedures and conditions there closely match the lower elementary.
Osyka Elementary School principal Angela Lowery said the lower student population should allow students to be adequately distanced, with no more than 15 students in any classroom.
Classes with more than 15 students — first grade now, and possibly kindergarten by the time school opens — will be broken down and split between available rooms, with those split away from their teacher joining in through online means.
High school principal Caprice Smalley and junior high principal Warren Eyster said distancing should be possible in their schools due to the A-B group scheduling for alternating days.
Eyster said enrollment up to Thursday stood about 260 students, down from 281 the previous year, and — with the student body split into two groups for the A and B days and about 60 junior high students known to be taking the district’s online learning option — the 100 or so students on campus each day should fit in classrooms pared down to no more than 12 desks each.
Smalley said a little more than 300 students had registered for in-person instruction and more than 50 for online instruction up to Thursday morning, out of a little more than 500 who would have been expected to be in classes due to normal promotion and retention.
He expected a maximum of nine students in each class, and said students and staff will have access to six different online platforms for instruction and lessons.
High school counselor Tyrone Varnado said 384 student registrations had been completed or were in progress, and 119 were incomplete. Forty students are enrolled in dual-credit courses.
Billy Passman, director of the district career and technical center, said state regulations require face-to-face contact between instructors and students, and students will attend their career classes on the days they do not have regular high school classes.
