When school came back in the fall of 2020 to a hybrid schedule a lot of households had hard choices to make, ours included. Several factors weighed in on our decision to keep our daughters full time remote learning for the first semester including: my ability to work from home every day, our children being fairly trustworthy of getting their work done, and my pessimistic belief that everyone would be full time remote by Thanksgiving due to an inability of the schools to keep the spread in check.
Then the schools proved me wrong. Between the intense cleaning protocols, social distancing, mask usage, and everything else that went into all the extra hours spent by teachers and staff we actually managed to minimize the spread from our children. The data not just here but nationwide bore out that the pre-variant virus, in an indoor environment with active mitigation, was not as contagious among kids as we all feared. That was a huge sigh of relief from most of the parents I know.
Because of that, after Christmas we decided to send our girls back to Pence and the Middle School in hybrid mode. Not long afterwards the community infection numbers dropped even more and they were back full time back in school for the rest of the year. Most parents agree that in person learning is critical for our kids development so I applaud all the extra hours and hard work that went into making that a reality to finish out last year.
A good school board is one that does not dig in their heels along ideological lines but instead stays open-minded enough to absorb constantly changing contradictory data to make informed flexible decisions based on what is best for the students, facility, and community at that moment. We are lucky to live in a community of intelligent, thoughtful individuals where a diversity of ideas can come together in a respectful dialog about what is best in our schools. I look forward to working together with every board member for the betterment of our schools and children.