It's been a question on the minds of teachers and families alike - what is this school year going to look like as we adapt to COVID-19?
Superintendents from schools across the county highlighted many of the steps that they plan to take as they begin welcoming their students back for the fall during the Lima Rotary Club meeting. No two schools were exactly the same.
The Apollo Career Center has a slightly different approach to how they can restart classes as many courses there require hands-on learning. They have incorporated that into the plan for this coming year.
"We will offer remote learning for academic reasons, but we will not offer remote learning for lab reasons," said Keith Horner, superintendent at Apollo. "Obviously you can’t teach welding if you don’t have welders in the classroom, so that’s not an option that we are offering. We’re really, really excited to get back to school; we really want to go back to school and we need those kids in the classroom."
Horner also says that they have been keeping up their communication between Apollo and the 11 high schools that they work with locally.
And over at the Shawnee Local School District, they are encouraging people to consider sending their kids back to traditional, face-to-face learning and have taken precautions including limiting outside interruptions that happen throughout the day.
But for those that wish to continue learning from home, that's an option too: "We understand that some families are going to want to be remote learning, so that’s a huge change for us as far as how we ended the year last year, versus this year, and how we want to approach it," said James Kanable, superintendent of the Shawnee Local School District. "That’s going to be the biggest change for kids, for families, is that it won’t be just kind of a 'come when you can' - those students who stay at home or are going to have to be part of the day-to-day operations of school, even from their home setting."
Kanable encourages families within the Shawnee School District to download their app for up-to-date information.
