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MURRAY — Will schools ever get "back to normal?" Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the first school district in Utah taking kids out of the classrooms over COVID-19 concerns, and officials from that district are still uncertain of what the future holds.
All it took for the Murray School District to go into a "soft closure" was one student who may have been near someone infected with COVID-19. They didn't actually have any sick children.
District spokesman Doug Perry says, "We, at the time, didn't know a whole lot about COVID-19. There were still a lot of people who didn't know anything about that."
In the end, the district believed it was better to be safe than sorry.
"We announced, out of an abundance of caution, that we were going to go into a soft closure with our school district," Perry says.
At the time, some people called it an overreaction, but then-Gov. Gary Herbert put all schools in a soft closure the very next day, and that was supposed to last just two weeks. Luckily for them, they had already been giving laptops to students and creating online teaching platforms before the pandemic. Perry says they were going to practice using it for things like snowstorms.
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A young fan was camped out on the front row next to tunnel where the Utah Jazz would soon run out at Madison Square Garden. With a Donovan Mitchell jersey in hand, he looked over the rail and cocked his head to the right and tried to get a glimpse inside."We were, in fact, planning to do sort of a drill of a soft closure in about two weeks from the time we actually did the closure," he says.
Even though the software was built and the laptops were in place, things were chaotic at the beginning of their remote learning.
Perry says, "There were definitely hiccups and there were definitely things to learn from and things that we had to improve, quickly."
Roughly two-thirds of the district's classes are in-person, and Perry says a growing number of parents want their kids to return to the classroom after Spring Break. However, they can't just get rid of online learning, completely.
He says, "We still have to have that online option, too, because there are kids who are extremely vulnerable to viruses."
Will things be "back to normal" in the fall? Perry says they're still trying to determine what their format is going to be, but they have a lot of unknowns.
"It should be better. We know that there will be close to herd immunity, if not herd immunity by then," Perry says.
