CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Several public school families in Chesapeake received a notification this week that they should prepare for virtual learning temporarily.
Schools on the list have a mixture of increased COVID-19 cases, and student and staff being absent. The school divisions made the decision on Friday to move some of those schools to virtual learning.
School officials announced temporary virtual instruction will start for Portlock Primary, Truitt Intermediate, Rena B. Wright Primary, Hugo Owens Middle, Oscar Smith Middle and Great Bridge Middle.
“Every parent in this district has no idea what they should be doing right now, and it is hard, it’s frustrating,” said Chesapeake parent Jeremy Rodden.
Rodden has two students in the school system.
“I am fortunate that I work from home, Rodden said. “If my children went virtual it wouldn’t be a huge tax on me or my family, but that is not the case for the majority of families.”
Chesapeake Public Schools has a three-tier color status: green, yellow and red.
The status changes based on three factors: the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in a school, how many staff are out of class and how many students are out.
Superintendent Dr. Jared Cotton said schools submit data for each category daily and his team discusses the next steps for a school.
“They look at real-time data from every school,” Dr. Cotton said.
A few parents expressed concern that some yellow schools on the dashboard had small COVID-19 case counts, but Cotton said those don’t factor in quarantine numbers for a school.
“What got them in yellow, frankly, was the number of folks on quarantine because of exposure and right now a lot of that exposure happened over holiday break,” Dr. Cotton said. “So, we don’t report cases outside of school. We report cases that happen in school. So that is why we are having a lot of people ask, what is the deal with the dashboard?”
He said the division’s quarantine dashboard will get updated Wednesday. Next, he said schools moving to virtual will do so for five days at the start.
“Our hope is that the five days will be enough time for us to address the spread,” Dr. Cotton said.
School division leaders said the following nine schools have been alerted they could go to virtual:
- Camelot Elementary
- Deep Creek Elementary
- Georgetown Primary
- Greenbrier Intermediate
- Southwestern Elementary
- Treakle Elementary
- Oscar Smith High
- Indian River Middle
- Indian River High
As for those that are making the switch, the division will assess the ability to resume in-person classes and update families on Thursday, January 13.