(Spirit Lake)– Students in the Spirit Lake Community School District will return to face-to-face learning next month, but Superintendent Dr. David Smith tells KUOO news just exactly how that might work and look is still somewhat uncertain…
“What we’re running into is people have different opinions on the same topic so if you talk to six people there might be three saying one thing, three say the other. But with that said you know our intention is to be back on site August 24th face-to-face school and get back to as close to a normal setting of school as we can possibly have.”
Dr. Smith adds the district has multiple scenarios that remain on the table…
“People want to be back at school in class. They want to see kids, they want to educate kids face-to-face. If we need to utilize some online we’ll attack that when we need to. We want to keep people as safe as possible and so we’re doing surveys right now and trying to figure out who has some pre-existing conditions or health concerns that we need to address, and that’s both students and adults and teachers, and other support staff here in school. So we’re conscious of all that and I know it’s going to be nearly impossible to keep everybody completely happy on every decision we make, but we’ve got a lot of really good people thinking through all of the details. We’re going to be very, very prepared to handle just about any situation, we hope, and we just want to get back at it.”
He says it’s likely at one point or another there will be some setbacks…
“We can’t stop every time there’s one case obviously or we will not be in school, so we’re going to have to, we’re going to continue to listen to people and continue to educate ourselves and be prepared and try to take care of all our people, all our teachers who are educating kids, to take care of our kids and bus drivers and cooks and everybody else we have along here as well as the families at home and the kids going home to families. The one thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to send a communication out to all the families and we’re going to encourage if you have any questions or issues that you contact us directly and we deal with those on a case by case basis and really try to accommodate our community and make it work where we’re back to school and we’re really trying to accommodate people as needed. But we still, we have to have people here to do this work and we’re excited to give it a try.”
Dr. Smith adds they likely will have more specific plans in place at the school board meeting in August. In the meantime, he says preparations are in full gear…
“We have 4,000 face masks ordered; we have 300 shields ordered; we are looking at some additional space; we have all of the sanitizing that we’ll need for, you know, a third of our year to start with and we’re looking at some additional support staff to help monitor. There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered and we will, we’re going to continue to work on answering those questions all the way up into the first week of August. And so we’re hoping that at our August meeting we’ll have a lot more clarity on some of these questions. But right now we’re back face-to-face and we’re excited to have the kids back and we’re excited to tell people that’s what we’re doin’. And hopefully our community can get back to doing business as well.”
Dr. Smith says the additional supplies and protective equipment needed will come with a price tag. He says they’re looking at additional resources from the state and federal levels and that if need be, they’re prepared to dip into the district’s unspent balance.
