VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — As COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations rise, parents, teachers and the Virginia Beach School Board gathered Tuesday to discuss how to keep teachers in the classroom and avoid switching to virtual learning.
"If their teacher becomes sick, the learning process will be put on hold because there is also a shortage of substitutes," said Virginia Beach teacher Renee Alexander.
Dr. Eugene Soltner, chief schools officer, and Jack Freeman, chief operations officer, told the board the rate of transmission inside schools is about 2% in Virginia Beach.
They said most of the increased cases among students and staff are happening outside of the classroom.
"The greatest impact of this recent surge on our schools is the ability to staff classrooms due to staff absences," said Freeman. "Our DOSL team and our schools have worked tirelessly to prevent closing even a single classroom due to staffing concerns."
They said right now, the mask mandate and other mitigation strategies remain the same and they continue to monitor transmission rates. However, as more staff members are calling out with the virus, they’ve come up with a new plan they say will hopefully keep schools open.
"A plan to keep schools open five days per week even with limited staffing capacity," said Soltner.
He said there are now three levels of intervention before deciding to close a school.
They said the first thing they would do is shift instructional support staff to fill staff vacancies. Level two would be to have the Department of School Leadership assign up to 50 central support staff to targeted schools on a rotating basis.
Level three is the same as level two but would assign up to 100 staff members. He said level three would be considered an all-hands-on-deck situation.
"Our goal, and a goal I know you embrace, is to keep our schools safely open for our staff, students, and community."
They said if a certain school reaches level three and is on the brink of having to close and switch to virtual learning, parents would be notified. Right now, schools officials said they are watching 8 to 12 schools, but that changes day to day depending on teacher quarantines.
School officials said they don’t have any hard numbers or signs that would trigger a school to close due to staffing shortages because things change day to day.
They still have a separate plan in place in the case that transmission rates get so high that they have to return some schools to online learning.
It’s also important to note that state law requires all public schools to offer in-person instruction to students five days a week, meaning an entire school division cannot close and move to virtual learning. It must be done on a school-by-school basis.