ISLE OF WIGHT, Va. (WAVY) — Isle of Wight County Schools officials have announced their plans to return lower grades to in-person learning five days a week.
In-person learning will start next week, on Tuesday, Feb. 16, for pre-K through fifth-grade students, the division announced Monday.
The division said in January it wanted pre-K through fifth-graders to return to classrooms full-time starting Feb. 16, but wanted to monitor coronavirus data before moving forward.
Current coronavirus mitigation strategies are working, the division said, with no cases linked to student-to-student, student-to-teacher or teacher-to-student spread since schools reopened Sept. 8.
If there is an outbreak, Superintendent Jim Thornton said the division could take certain steps such as closing an individual classroom or school and return to remote or hybrid learning.
“Should we start seeing numbers of cases or quarantines increasing, the Superintendent can close a classroom, a school, or even the entire division and quickly return students to temporarily remote or hybrid learning if necessary,” the division wrote in the news release Monday afternoon.
The division says the decision won’t affect students on the virtual learning model for the second semester.
The division plans to continue monitoring COVID-19 data for returning other grade levels to the five-day in-person learning model.
Updated bus schedules for elementary schools will be posted by Friday on the division’s website.
The Isle of Wight community is still seeing record levels of coronavirus cases, but the CDC and other health leaders say in-person learning can be done safely with proper precautions are in place. However schools in the U.K. and Portugal, which had been able to safely reopen for in-person, recently switched back to all-virtual due to a more contagious coronavirus variant that’s now in the United States (and Virginia).
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week that all Virginia schools will need to offer at least some form of in-person learning starting March 15.