Monongalia County’s school district is continuing to inch to its way to what passes for normalcy in the (maybe) post-pandemic world.
That was the message Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. delivered during Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting.
The district’s long-awaited mask-optional policy went into to effect last Wednesday, and Campbell said the move was generally welcomed by students and their parents.
School administrators also reported a smooth transition, the superintendent said, even as some continued to report to their buildings while wearing the facial coverings that have become standard issue since March 2020.
“We met with our principals the next day, and they said it was very positive,” Campbell said.
One thing that isn’t as positive as it has been in past months, is the rate of people coming down with COVID here, according to the most recent numbers from the state Department of Health and Human Resources.
As of Tuesday, the county was showing 70 active cases, the DHHR said. Mon County was one of 49 of the state’s 55 counties also showing green on agency’s alert map. No counties were sitting in red on that map of that day’s edition.
With the coronavirus apparently waning, Campbell said plans are also underway to publicly honor the district’s retirees of the past three years, something it hasn’t been able to do, as people hunkered down at home to stave off infection rates, and large gatherings were restricted.
In the meantime, students and staffers will be in the spotlight for their academic and professional achievements during the upcoming April 19 BOE meeting, which will be at South Middle School.
With that, the BOE is pivoting to the day-to-day call of classwork and assessments, comparing pre-pandemic scores and other numbers from the 2018-19 academic year to the present.
“We’re finally getting to talk about academics,” board president Nancy Walker said, “which is what we’ve been wanting to do all along.”
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