More and more students are heading back to the classroom full time.
Middle and high school students at Greenwood and Indian Creek schools will begin going to school five days a week Monday, a response to declining COVID-19 cases and positivity rates in Johnson County.
Students at Franklin schools will also increase their time in the classroom, going from two days a week to four days a week in-person, with Wednesday still reserved as a cleaning day.
After finalizing new sanitization procedures, students at Franklin schools will return to daily in-person learning March 8, said David Clendening, superintendent.
The three districts will join Clark-Pleasant schools in increasing the amount of time students spend in classrooms. Students at Clark-Pleasant Middle School and Whiteland Community High School returned to school full time on Wednesday.
With the exception of Edinburgh schools, which has had students in school five days a week for months, middle and high school students throughout Johnson County had been going to school two days a week on alternating schedules, known as a hybrid model. Elementary and intermediate school students across the county have been in school five days a week since the start of the school year.
The changes come as Johnson County had less than 200 cases per 100,000 residents last week, moving the county to “yellow” on the Indiana State Department of Health’s dashboard, less severe than the “orange” and “red” the county had been in since early November. The state’s color-coded metrics are based on community spread.
Center Grove schools has not yet said whether it will bring students to school buildings more often. The hybrid model there is slated to continue until at least Friday, according to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard.
Greenwood schools is prepared to introduce students back to five-day classroom learning successfully, said Kent DeKoninck, superintendent.
“We’ve done this long enough; we have the cleaning standards down,” DeKoninck said. “We’re excited and excited for our faculty and students. We said from day one, we always believed having kids in person five days a week is the best mode of instruction. This allows us to get back to that goal.”
Students will still have to take precautions, such as wearing masks and washing their hands, but Franklin schools is prepared to have students back in the classroom full-time, too said David Clendening, superintendent.
“It’s time to get back to school now that we’re in ‘yellow,’ to begin more in-person learning,” Clendening said. “I’m excited for us to get back to the way we do school. There’s still going to be nuances — we will still wear masks and socially distance — but it’s good to get the kids back not only from the academic domain, but also the social-emotional space.”
