MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — It appears as though Monongalia County Schools will be going remote with their learning for the rest of 2020.
After a rise of COVID-19 cases in Monongalia County as well across the state, the decision was made by the Monongalia County Board of Education to move all classes to a remote learning format for K-12 students. The decision was made as a result of the amount of cases that were confirmed in Monongalia County that lead to the county rising to gold on the statewide COVID-19 map.
“We can look at the trends in Monongalia County and see, that for the most part, we think that we will be at least Orange come Saturday night,” explained Monongalia County Superintendent Dr. Eddie Campbell. “I didn’t think there was any real purpose in spreading this out through the week,” he said.
This move towards remote learning will be an addition to measures implemented by the Monongalia County Board of Education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally offering blended learning and remote learning options back when the 2020-21 school year began in August, remote learning slowly began to become the more regular fixture as COVID-19 cases rose across West Virginia. According to Campbell, these decisions were always reconsidered, both for better and worse, as the COVID-19 map was updated at the beginning and end’s of the week.
“That gives us the flexibility to wait until Saturday to see what the state education map puts us at, and that would be based on Thursday’s numbers,” he said.
One of the main influences in the decision was not necessarily safety concerns of Monongalia County students according to Campbell. Highlighting the safety precautions that schools have implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, he stated that getting the appropriate amount of staffing in order to have even remote learning has been a challenge. While acknowledging that it wasn’t over the lack of teacher’s desire to work, but rather having them all heathy for a single period to where fifty positions can be filled in the school system.
“The issue is that we’re having to quarantine so many staff members because of exposure from folks that are outside the school that have it, that we’re having trouble filling those positions,” he said.
Even though there is a desire to return to blended learning options, it is still a play it by ear situation for the Monongalia County Board of Education. In the past seven days, over 1,100 cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Monongalia County by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, the majority stemming from travels during the Thanksgiving holiday. With the holiday season in full swing, more cases are expecting to be confirmed instead of the decline that would be needed to move toward a return to blended learning. In the meantime for the Monongalia County BOE, it’s still a play it by ear situation.
“In this particular case, we can project out some of the numbers that we’ve seen from the seven day rolling averages that we’re presented with and we can see that the numbers are going the wrong way, so we’ll monitor that,” said Campbell.