Daviess County, Owensboro Schools Reveal Reopening Plans
It seems this summer's largest amount of speculation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic has been about how schools will reopen for the 2020-21 school year.
Thursday afternoon, both Owensboro Public Schools and Daviess County Public Schools presented reopening proposals.
DCPS is looking at implementing an A/B Rotation.
With the A/B Rotation, there are two groups. The students in Group A would attend class in person on Mondays and Tuesdays, go all digital instruction on Wednesdays, and have hybrid days on Thursdays and Fridays.
Hybrid days are days when students would read, write, and learn independently. On these days, they may watch videos recorded by their teachers and complete assignments either digitally or by hand. There will also be a "Phone an Educator" option.
For students in Group B, the schedules would simply be the opposite--hybrid days on Mondays and Tuesdays, in person days on Thursdays and Fridays.
All students' Wednesdays would be digital days.
Now, should circumstances warrant, DCPS has planned an NTI or "red" schedule, with "in person" days replaced with virtual days, meaning students and teachers will work together in a virtual environment, with smaller class sizes.
Health and safety measures will, naturally, also be in place.
In the meeting, there was also an explanation of the DCPS Virtual Academy, the parameters of which--and so much more--you can see in this video:
In the OPS outline for school year 2020-21, the district will consider multiple strategies in order to "maintain smaller groups of students in shared spaces."
They include an implementation of the A/B model mentioned above, limiting the number of on-campus visitors, staggering meal times even more so than usual and serving meals in smaller group settings, spacing desks further apart in classrooms, limiting heavy hallway traffic, omitting large gatherings, utilizing outdoor spaces for learning as much as is feasible, serving individually-plated or pre-packaged meals in an effort to eliminate self-service, and identifying a special "sick room" for students who aren't feeling well as a means of keeping them away from other students.
Safety measures were outlined in great detail as well.
You can see the entire reopening outline by clicking here.