By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph school officials will scrap the hybrid learning model adopted in October.
St. Joseph School Superintendent Doug Van Zyl says those students attending in-class will return to their school building five days a week beginning in the second semester.
“When we started face-to-face in the fall, due to issues we went to the hybrid schedule,” Van Zyl tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline. “The board chose to stay with the hybrid schedule through the end of the first semester, which for us is January 13th.”
The St. Joseph School Board voted unanimously Monday night to go back to in-class learning for those not enrolled in the Virtual Academy.
Elementary students have been meeting in class four days a week, learning remotely on Wednesdays. Middle and high school students had been attending in-class only two days a week.
The district went to the hybrid model when too many teachers either contracted COVID-19 or had been in close enough contact with someone who tested positive to keep them from returning to the classroom, causing massive staff shortages throughout the district.
Van Zyl says the student population hasn’t been hit as hard.
“Not that we’re not having cases in school, but a majority of the cases that we’ve been able to contact trace and follow have actually taken place outside of school.,” Van Zyl says. “And so, students for the most part have been pretty flat during this whole time on the number of cases that we’ve had. So that’s a positive. It’s really the adults that are impacted.”
Van Zyl says adopting the hybrid model received mixed reviews.
“Some people feel, hey, the dumbest thing you ever did was not keep everybody in for five days and you’ve got some people who feel like the dumbest thing you ever did was the opposite.”
Van Zyl says students will return to fulltime classroom study January 14th, the first day of the new semester.
The decision does not affect those students enrolled in the district’s Virtual Academy.