FRANKFORT, Ky. - Public Health Commissioner Dr. Steven Stack called it "premature" to determine yet whether schools in Kentucky will reopen as usual for the fall semester. Stack appeared in the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) weekly webcast chat to offer advice to superintendents who are planning safety measures for the return to class. 

 

What You Need To Know


  • Public Health Commissioner, KDE provide advice for superintendents looking to return to class this fall

  • Superintendents consider various safety measures 

  • More guidance expected on Tuesday

 

Superintendents floated ideas like doing temperature checks, alternating schedules between groups of students, having teachers change classrooms instead of students moving and mingling together to switch classes, staggering recess, and designating an isolation room in case a child becomes ill. They're all only suggestions for now. KDE provides guidance as individual districts form their own plans and many are already requesting more Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) days, in case an occasion calls for in-home learning once again. 

Dr. Stack said it's reasonable to believe social distancing will still be practiced this fall, and it will be crucial to thin out the density of people in a single small space. Superintendents questioned the ability to bus kids who need transportation. There's no clear answer on how to make that possible while social distancing, yet. 

"There's a lot of different issues at hand here," KDE Interim Communications Director Toni Konz Tatman told Spectrum News 1. She moderates KDE's weekly webcasts that resume this Tuesday, when more guidance is expected. 

"Depending on a district's size, how many children they are serving, what the particular situation is in their county when it comes to the COVID situation- are they having a lot of cases in that area, how the community feels at certain time about returning to school...these are all different things that local school districts are having to look at," she said. 

"It may mean we have to accept that when school opens up, that there are more kids together than we'd prefer because the counterbalancing tradeoffs of having them fall further behind in education, of having parents who can't be at work, that those things are so substantial, that we have to try to figure out how to navigate the tradeoff," Dr. Stack told superintendents in the webcast Tuesday.