Jefferson R-7 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade are expected to return to in-classroom instruction four days a week beginning Oct. 20, after the end of the first quarter.
The Jefferson R-7 Board of Education voted 4-3 Wednesday evening (Sept. 16) to approve plans to allow those students back in school classrooms for four-day weeks. Board members Jimmy Jackson, Pete McPeters and Heather Schnitzler, along with board president Karen Koenig, voted for the plan with Justin Neel, Natalie Fallert and Wayne Surratt voting against the move.
Students in grades six through 12, however, will have to wait longer.
A second motion, to return the secondary-grade students to four-day, in-person instruction, was defeated in a 3-4 vote, with Fallert, Jackson and McPeters voting in favor and Koenig, Neel, Schnitzler and Surratt voting against
The district’s first day of school this year was Aug. 24, with some students returning either under a hybrid-learning system with both in-person and home-based learning, or under strictly at-home, online learning.
The district has 1,063 students in preschool through 12th grade. Currently 942 of them are going to school under a four-day-per-week, hybrid system, with those students attending in person two days a week and working online at home the other two days. The remaining 121 students are learning completely online at home.
Families will still have the choice to keep their children home for online learning only when the lower-grade classrooms reopen.
“At our last month’s meeting, we set criteria which the district would have to meet to go from yellow, where we are now, to green status,” Koenig said. “Moving to another level was contingent on meeting those criteria.
“Right now, based on the data we have, the Plattin (kindergarten through second-grade) and Telegraph (preschool and third- through fifth-grade) buildings are where they need to be.”
Superintendent Clint Johnston said more students at the middle school and high school are in quarantine than is acceptable under its criteria to return them to classrooms for four days a week. The football teams at both schools were exposed to a positive case when they played last week against teams from the Dunklin R-5 School District, where a number of students have tested positive for the virus.
So the Jefferson R-7 middle school and high school students will remain on the hybrid schedule for now.
“As soon as they meet the criteria as well, we will be ready to go,” Koenig said.
“Look, everyone wants the same thing: All the kids back in the classroom all the time. We just have to work together to safely get us there.”
Johnston said the district has had six positive COVID-19 cases among students and none among staff. Also, numerous students have been quarantined because of potential exposure to the virus.
