When it comes to the school year this year, logistics seems like the main concern. How’s it going to work?! Everything from daily instruction, to athletics to transportation. Debbie Lazaga takes a closer look at what it’s going to take to safely get students to and from their schools.
You remember getting on the bus and rushing to get to the seats in the way back? Well, busing students is going to look a bit different this year for school districts that are going back to full time face-to-face or a hybrid structure.
“They’ll load from the regular door but they’ll start seating at the back of the bus, and then working their way forward so we don’t have a lot of kids passing each other on the bus,” says Assistant Superintendent for the Waukesha School District, Joe Cook.
“We will do our best to try to go only one kid to a seat if it’s possible. We’ll try to begin to look at assigned seating on the bus, that would start, again, from the first kid picked up to the back of the bus and making sure we’ve got a record of that,” explains Cook.
And once you get to the destination, it’ll look pretty familiar if you’ve ever ridden on a plane, with kids unloading from the front first.
And the buses themselves will be getting special treatment.
Cook says, “They’re going to be applying an antiviral, antimicrobial treatment to the buses on a monthly basis, that lasts for 30 days.”
These treatments will be in addition to any daily cleaning or special cleaning that may be needed should a student test positive.
Speaking of testing positive, what happens if someone who rode the bus gets sick?
“We’ll be working with the contact tracers from the county to try to identify as many people as that person had close contact with,” explains Cook.
Athletics is also going to be handled differently. For example, in the West Bend school district, Assistant Superintendent Andrew Sarnow says they should be able to handle it with the same precautions as the standard school-day busing, but they’re also looking at other ways to handle away games.
“We’re actually looking at expanding this to where, with some of these away competitions, if the parents can transport their children. We’re looking at exploring those options as well to help minimize exposure,” explains Sarnow.
You can pretty much expect it to be very similar when or if field trips can start again… hey a kid can dream right?