Covid-19 forced schools all across the nation to be online and later to be on a partial face to face schedule, but as conditions around Texas and mainly Denton started to get better, the Superintendent of the Denton High area saw an opportunity to reopen schools full time.

“When we made the decision to bring high school students back full-time, we had an abundance of data collected about our COVID protocols because elementary and middle school students had been face-to-face for some time,” Denton High area superintendent Lacey Rainey said.

“Through examination of the data with the Denton County Health Department, we determined that our procedures are effective at mitigating the spread of COVID and we could safely bring back high school students.”

With the large amount of students coming back to full time, that left some teachers with not a lot of room for social distance in the classrooms. Many teachers had some doubt and fear in what class would look like, but they have found ways to improvise.

“ It’s been extremely difficult to have social distance in my classroom and in the locker rooms for baseball,” Head Baseball coach Toby Rumfield said. “ We don’t want a shutdown in the program that could lead to the entire school being shut down. “

“I’ve had some challenges so far, but overall we feel safe and that comes from following the guidelines.”

Many students had mixed feelings about going back to school full time, and how it would affect their health going back home. The amount of students having a hard time learning at home swayed many leaders of the district to going back full time, but some students still have doubts about what will happen in the future.

“I have very mixed opinions about the safety of going back full time,” Sophomore Caitlyn Labate said. “I still feel it was a bad and early move considering the spike recently and the personal health of others should be a higher priority. It could spread to family and older relatives and harm them more than we think.”

A large number of parents and teachers were worried about the lack of learning from the 7 months off and the online/hybrid schedule. That left district officials pondering over many different ideas on how to get kids back to learning at a normal rate. It was clear that the data was in favor of going back full time.

“After looking at student progress data, we felt it was important to allow students to come back face-to-face, full-time,” Dr. Rainey said. “Despite our best efforts to provide students with connectivity and devices, many students were not logging in to Canvas to complete their coursework. We felt that if we continued with the hybrid learning option, we would have many students that we would not be able to recapture because their academic gaps would be too vast.”