Assistant School Superintendent John Lott said enrollment in Levy County public school increased by 170 over August of 2019. File Photo by Terry Witt
By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
Levy County public schools closed out the first week of classes Friday with no COVID-19 incidents reported and 5,414 students in attendance classes, an increase of 170 over August of 2019.
“I felt pretty good about the first week of classes. Next week should be even better,” said Assistant Superintendent John Lott. “Hopefully we won’t have any massive quarantine situations. I know I’ve heard Union had one and I guess Dixie had one and I heard Gilchrist had one. The numbers vary but they’ve all seen quarantine situations already. I’m sure we’ll get them. It’s a matter of trying to keep the numbers down as much as we can.”
Lott said almost all of the staff members in Levy County schools were wearing masks the first week, which was good, but he said fewer students were wearing them as the week wore on.
Students were given three learning options.
Most students chose Option 1, known as face to face learning in school buildings, while some selected Option 2, a blend of traditional classroom instruction and virtual learning, and others selected Option 3, which involves staying home to take classes online. Lott said the number of students taking classes online at home or using the blended system shrank during the week.
“They have gone from Option 2 and Option 3 to face to face by several hundred students,” Lott said. “I talked to several parents who thought their phones would be sufficient as far as hot spots and connectivity to the internet. I think they found out that was not the case. They have chosen to come back to Option 1,” he said.
Lott said about 90 percent of the students in the district have chosen to be educated in a face to face traditional classroom setting although the numbers will continue to fluctuate through the second week of school.
Football and volleyball practices haven’t started in Levy County schools. Football teams and volleyball teams are participating in conditioning programs. The teams are supposed to start practicing next week.
“We’re trying to get some guidelines from the Florida High School Athletic Association and kind of modify those to meet our specific needs and our facilities,” Lott said. “We’ll hopefully have that for our next board meeting, which is Aug. 25.”
Lott was asked what specific circumstances would lead to a quarantine of students in a given school. He said the circumstances could vary.
Someone could have symptoms or they could have had contact with someone who tested positive. It could be their mother or father that tested positive, Lott said citing an example.
If a person was standing within six feet of someone for more than 15 minutes and that individual tested positive, the person would be considered a contact that would have to be quarantined for 14 days at that point, Lott said.
“Those guidelines are also going to be brought to the board next Tuesday and we will have the health department at the meeting,” Lott said. “That’s going to be run through the board to make sure everyone is on the same page and the board approves of our procedures.”
Lott said many of these procedures are changing, including CDC guidelines. He said sometimes “it almost feels like it’s useless to put something out there” and have the procedure change as soon as it’s in place.
“We’re doing the best we can in that regard,” he said.
Lott said he is pleased at the overall numbers he saw in the first week of classes. He said the district is working through problems and trying to consolidate some of the blended classes to make it as easy for the teachers as possible. In some cases outside instructors are used to maximize resources.
“We don’t want a teacher teaching three kids and getting paid a full salary, so we’re trying to consolidate, combine, and in some cases we will use outside resources to teach these kids when it doesn’t make sense to use our teachers. It’s more cost effective, in some cases, to use outside resources,” he said.
School district officials had been worried before the start of classes that they were unable to reach 20 percent of the parents in the district. They wanted the parents to choose one of the three learning options. Nearly all of the parents and students showed up in the first week of school.
“There’s still about 40, we don’t know where they’re at; we don’t know if they’re in the county or in the state,” Lott said. “They really have just fallen off the face of the earth. They certainly haven’t shown up or contacted us to say, hey, my kid wants Option 3. We’re reaching out to them with every number we have. It’s not really all that uncommon. These phone numbers change constantly. In some cases, people are very transient in these hard times. They could have left the state and gone to live with their relatives in another state and just not told anyone.”
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Enterprise Reporting By Terry Witt August 21, 2020; Posted August 21, 2020
