Students at Canandaigua Academy, Wayne Central School District, and Batavia City Schools are returning to a mix of online and in-person instruction this week. Those schools switched to remote-only instruction last month.
Batavia Superintendent Anibal Solar said around 30 teachers were ordered to quarantine because of close contact with someone with COVID-19. He said it pushed the district into a pause on in-person teaching, and they were concerned that they wouldn’t have enough instructors for students.
“In the past, substitutes would be maybe a day or two of coverage, or you may have had a maternity leave and that’s 5 or 6 weeks,” said Solar. “Now it's like multiple people out, 14-day windows. It just makes it too tough to manage.”
Solar said most employees in Batavia schools are out of quarantine, or will be soon. But with a piece of Batavia and Genesee County still in a yellow zone, he said that flexibility is a must.
“Our number one job in schools is teaching and learning,” said Solar. “As we know that we may potentially switch back to a remote model, we must make sure that we have a more robust, stronger, more high quality distance learning experience for our kids.”
Solar said the goal is to make the classroom experience for the district’s middle and high school students as seamless as possible, with half of any classroom often watching live from home while the other half is in person.
“They rotate every other day,” said Solar. “So if we were to switch, it’s the same time they’d log on, their schedule is pretty regimented and set. The more days we've been doing this, the more that teachers are confident and feeling more better prepared.”
