Students in Cherry Creek School District will move to remote learning for the foreseeable future, as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to surge across Colorado.
Middle and high school students will finish the week in-person and start remote education next Wednesday, according to a letter sent by Superintendent Scott Siegfried. That gives teachers Monday and Tuesday of next week to plan and prepare for the transition. Preschool and elementary school students will have their last day of in-person classes on Wednesday before starting remotely on Monday, Nov. 16, the letter said.
Older students are switching to remote first because middle and high schools have seen higher rates of positive cases, Siegfried said. It’s unclear how long the district will keep students and staff remote. Siegfried said only that he hopes this switch is “short-lived, and students are again in class very soon.” He is also discussing options with public health experts to bring back the district’s youngest learners back first for in-person learning.
Ultimately, he’s watching for seven- to 14-day sustained improvement in COVID-19 trends before reopening schools to in-person learning.
“Today is the ninth day in a row that the district COVID Tracker dashboard has posted a ‘red zone’ rating. The virus is now at a dangerous level in our community and we have seen a sustained trend in the data,” Siegfried said in the letter. “I do not take the decision to switch to remote learning lightly. … Our internal data continues to show that spread of the virus is minimal inside schools. However, the level of spread in the community is so significant that we are seeing increased student and staff cases coming into the schools from the community making it more difficult to operate.”
Siegfried hinted earlier this week that a change to the learning format could come soon. CCSD has hosted in-person classes since August, when preschool through fifth grade students went back full time and sixth through 12th grade students began attending on a hybrid schedule.
Despite reporting dozens of cases within schools and one outbreak at Cherry Creek High School that sent more than 1,700 students to online education, Siegfried remained a staunch proponent of in-person learning. But recently the metrics the district uses to monitor community spread have increasingly shown signs for concern.
According to Tri-County Health Department, the positivity rate within the CCSD’s geographic limits was 10.36% for the two weeks ending Nov. 4. There were also about 492 cases per 100,000 people over the same time period.
“I have said from the beginning that the data will determine whether we have In-Person or Remote learning, and the data has clearly shown a sustained trend of concerning numbers,” Siegfried wrote.
Cherry Creek is just the latest district to scale back in-person learning in light of COVID-19 trends. In October, Aurora Public Schools, Westminster Public Schools, Sheridan School District No. 2 and Adams County School District 14 moved most, if not all, of their students to online learning. Adams 12 Five Star Schools recently shifted secondary students online through the end of the fall semester.
Denver Public Schools scaled back in-person classes for some elementary students less than a week after they returned to school. The state’s largest district also decided to keep middle and high school students in virtual education through mid-December, or the end of the semester.
