By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
St. Joseph schools open today in the face of an uncertain school year as the coronavirus pandemic looms over all the excitement of the first day.
Superintendent Doug Van Zyl says the hope is to start classes today and continue through a regular school year.
“We want to avoid a shutdown,” Van Zyl tells St. Joseph Post. “We want to avoid anybody getting sick or ill. But, when that happens and if that happens, we’ll just have to deal with that and continue to move forward.”
St. Joseph school officials extended the spring break during the last academic year to April 6th due to concerns about COVID-19, but the state intervened and Gov. Mike Parson in early April ordered all Missouri public schools to close for the rest of the year. That ended the year for the approximately 10,800 St. Joseph public school students.
School reopens today in St. Joseph for the first time since the state ordered that shutdown.
First day excitement this year is mixed with lingering anxiety as the coronavirus pandemic remains active and cases in Buchanan County have actually been trending up.
Worries about the coronavirus have led many parents to take the district up on the opportunity to have their children learn remotely, via online over the computer at home. More children have enrolled in the Virtual Academy than anticipated with around 2,800 children set to take instruction online from home this year.
Van Zyl has high hopes for this new school year, but says contingencies are in place should a building suffer a COVID-19 outbreak.
“Well, the contingencies are, if we needed to, we could go to remote learning,” Van Zyl says. “If we needed to close down a classroom, because of cases involving that environment, we could take that whole class and make it into a remote learning opportunity. We could make the whole building remote learning if we needed to. We could make multiple buildings remote learning if we needed to, which just depends on how long that facility would need to be closed down, disinfected; how long people had to quarantine.”
Though opening day has that mix of excitement and anxiety, the district’s teachers are up to the challenge, according to Van Zyl.
“This is what their desire is. Their desire is to help kids and to help them not only socially, emotionally, but academically, and they haven’t really been able to do that over these last five months. So, I think there’s an excitement for them to be able to bring kids back into our buildings,” Van Zyl says, pointing out that for some, the first day of school will be at home. Van Zyl says that’s a challenge for student and teacher. “For some of our staff this is kind of a career-changing opportunity for some of those that are going virtual; an opportunity to do something they’ve never done before.”
Enrollment in the Virtual Academy grew so much, the district reopened the old Noyes Elementary School building and remade it into the virtual learning hub, housing about 95 staff.
