Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

It’s officially been one week since Lowndes County schools gave students the option to return to in-person instruction for the fourth nine weeks.

And according to Superintendent Jason Burroughs, this decision was made during a recent Board of Education meeting.

“During our recent school board meeting I make the recommendation to offer in-person and virtual schooling for the fourth nine weeks,” Superintendent Burroughs explained. “Once we came to a decision on that, our principals surveyed parents to determine how many of them wanted their child to return to in-person learning. That data was extremely important for us to gather. Without it, our schools wouldn’t have been able to plan for how to safely engage with students.”

Superintendent Burroughs says part of that plan involves requiring all in-person students to continue wearing a face mask

“Despite Governor Kay Ivey’s mask mandate recently ending we will still require students to wear a facemask for the remainder of the school year,” Superintendent Burroughs explained. “We want to be absolutely sure that everyone is safe while in close proximity of one another.”

Besides facemasks, any student who returns to in-person instruction will still receive virtual instruction on Fridays. Fridays will be designated as a deep cleaning day for all schools in the county.

“While speaking with the superintendents in the surrounding counties recently, I realized that they had all designated one day of the week to deep clean the schools,” said Superintendent Burroughs. “Some of those principals designed that day to Monday. Others designed their cleaning day for Wednesday. However, I realized that our county didn’t have a day for us to get the schools cleaned properly. So, I went to the president of the Board of Education and discussed the idea of designating Friday as our day to do that.”

Although this isn’t exactly what parents and students had in mind when discovering that they could return to in-person learning, many as still excited at the chase to finally see things returning to normal.