School to start here on Aug. 24

It isn't an easy decision, especially when dealing with so many people in one building during this uncertain time dealing with the unknown.
Gov. Tim Walz announced on Thursday that school districts could determine which of three options they felt would be in the best interest of their students; (1) Start on time this fall with all students in school; (2) Hybrid learning in which the number of students can't exceed half of the building's capacity size; and (3) Continue distance learning as the school did over the final three months of the 2019-2020 school year.
After much discussion and planning, the Minneota School District has determined that at this time it is planning on having school start for all grades on Monday, Aug. 24 to full capacity.
"Our goal all along was to bring the students back in a safe manner this fall," said Minneota Superintendent Dan Deitte. "We have been in contact with the Department of Education and the Department of Health and we are following all of their guidelines."
Minneota is utilizing the hybrid option in which schools can start to 50 percent or less capacity of the building capacity while maintaining proper spacing.
"The school has a capacity of 1,600 people and we will have around 650; about 550 students and 100 adults," Deitte explained. "So this works out for us."
Minneota had many people involved in making decisions and preparing the classrooms for students in all grades, including nurses, teachers, administrators, a COVID coordinator, custodians and more.
These people were broken into various task forces in order to properly prepare for the well being of all students and staff. Some of those task forces included sanitation, transportation, nursing, and elementary and high school classes.
"Our biggest challenge was the high number of high school students in some of the classes," Deitte said. "For the most part, the average elementary class sizes will be 17 or 18 students.
"But some of the high school class sizes will be 27 or 28 kids in certain electives. The third grade class size is a little larger (46 students), but we were able to make that work with 23 and 23."
The high school band and choir numbers posed somewhat of a challenge with around 60 students expected. In order to maintain proper spacing with that many students, the school will be renting out the American Legion building for two hours each morning.
"The Legion has a lot of space," said Deitte. "And we will bring our own band chairs and they are allowing us to keep them set up every day. And the kids can keep their instruments locked in a room downstairs."
The administration and task forces also had to do some shifting around in order to utilize larger rooms for classes with additional students.
"For instance, the library will be made into a classroom, but will be kept as a library for the elementary students," Deitte said."The band room and the choir room will now be classrooms. We took the computer lab apart and will use that for a classroom because it's a little larger. And our conference room where we hold school board meetings will be used for a classroom, too."
When the school staff decided on all the proper ways to maintain a safe environment for the children, they sent their plans to some parents to get their input and to see if they felt the school needed to do anything else in order to make it safe to send the kids back to school.
"We got some good feedback from them," Deitte said. I feel that we've done our due diligence the last seven weeks in order to make this work so the kids could go back to school.
"Unless something crazy happens in the next three weeks, we are planning to have school start on time. Distance learning is still an option, however, for those parents who don't feel it's safe for their kids to return to school. We sent out a survey to every parent to see if they want their kids to have in-school learning or distance learning."
School districts across the state must meet certain standards within their county in order to have students returns to school. If a county has a high number of COVID-19 cases, that district may not be allowed to have all students return to school, or may have to continue distance learning until those numbers decrease.
Minneota School District follows Lyon County as its primary county because that is where the higher number of students within the district reside. There are also students that attend Minneota from Lincoln and Yellow Medicine counties.
Lincoln County currently has a higher number of cases because of a recent outbreak in Tyler.
"I talked at length with someone from the Minnesota Department of Health last Friday and explained our situation," Deitte said. "Because of the things we have in place with distancing and larger rooms, and because Lyon County is our primary county, they felt we could bring back the students on the hybrid learning option."
The decision on the return of fall sports was determined by an announcement from the Minnesota State High School League on Tuesday.
St. Edward School will hold an open house on Monday, August 24 at 6 p.m. They will begin regular classes on Tuesday, August 25.