The Foothills School Division is preparing for the return of students and teachers next week.

Superintendent Chris Fuzessy says the number of parents opting for online learning has jumped a bit.

"We've seen an increase of what was hovering around four per cent to around seven or eight per cent of parents choosing hub@home and that's going to necessitate some staffing adjustments across the system," he says. "That's where it sits right now but we don't have responses from every parent, the survey was sent out, it's student based so the numbers, it's hard to quantify per family but I guess I'd say we've got 70 to 80 per cent of responses in at this point."

He says the number has increased as parents got to see specific school plans that were sent out last week.

"The opportunity for parents to make an informed decision is very important to us and so the timeline that we created we knew we were going to be up against this by the end of this week and we're prepared to deal with that and make sure that our schools and our online school fully staffed and ready to go, as of next week."

Students will be working with specific teachers online who will build the lessons and hold meetings with students but families will still maintain contact with their home school as well.

Fuzessy says if there are learning challenges that develop parents and students can contact their home school and liaise with that home school team and a platform's also been built that allows hub@home teachers to also liaise with home school teachers or for school leadership teams to liaise with one another to make sure everyone has up to date and relevant information.

He says division officials and board trustees have decided to tap into reserves if needed to increase the presence of custodial staff during the day and increase cleaning protocols so they should have what they need.

"Our approach, and the approach we've been asked to look at through public health as well as education is to have a variety of risk mitigation strategies in place at every school and in every classroom and so in situations where that physical distancing where we're not able to have that two metre distance, well what are the other risk mitigation factors that we are putting in place," Fuzessy says.

That means things like washing hands frequently, staggered times for entering and leaving the schools, having lockers three or four lockers apart and increased cleaning protocols.

Kids head back to classes starting Monday, August 31.

 

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