Habersham County public schools to reopen Tuesday

It’s been over five months since Habersham County students last stepped foot inside a classroom. Tomorrow, 5,852 of them will return to the county’s thirteen public school campuses while 988 others will resume their studies online.

Fourteen percent of Habersham’s public school students enrolled in virtual school. Those who didn’t will have some adjusting to do. Teachers have spent the past several weeks reorganizing classrooms and schedules to limit the potential spread of COVID-19.

“I am looking forward to having our students back on campus at Habersham Central for the 20-21 school year,” high school principal Jonathan Stribling wrote in a letter to parents.

The high school serves a quarter of all the students enrolled in the district. There will be 1,524 of them on campus come Tuesday [182 opted for online classes]. As they return, Stribling says students can expect “many changes” to their daily routine.

Some of those changes include:

• Buses will unload one at a time to limit congestion as students enter the building.
• Students not eating breakfast at school will report directly to their classrooms beginning at 7:30 a.m. to limit crowding in hallways and to prevent large gatherings.
• Lunch shifts will be reduced. Students will eat in their classroom one week, and in the cafeteria the next.
• Students will use one-way hallways during class changes and other travel routes outside to relieve congestion and maximize social distancing.
• In the afternoon, students will be released from school on a staggered schedule.

Central has created four new outdoor classrooms and enhanced its HVAC filtration system, according to Stribling. And the school nurse’s clinic has been relocated to provide more space for waiting, evaluation, and isolation. The clinic now also has an exterior door so that sick students may be picked up without having to walk through the building.

In his letter, Stribling says “rest assured that safety will remain Habersham Central’s top priority.” He also calls on parents to do their part by keeping sick students at home. And he asks parents to remind their students to maintain social distancing and encourage them to wear face coverings when that’s not possible.

Based on the list Stribling provided, only school nutrition staff are required to wear face coverings.

READ Stribling’s letter here

If Friday night’s football game is any indication, keeping students separated after they’ve been apart for so long will require due diligence. Teachers at Central and other schools will take on hall and lunch line monitoring duties to enforce social distancing.

Faculty and staff have been preparing for Tuesday since they returned to work on August 3. By the end of last month, only four of the system’s 1,094 employees had tested positive for COVID-19. As of last week, they were all back at work, according to Habersham County School Superintendent Matthew Cooper.

Eight other employees were quarantined due to possible exposure outside the school system. Cooper emphasizes that none of them were exposed at school.

Starting on September 8, Habersham Schools will devote a section of its website homepage to COVID-19. It will include a weekly update of active cases among students and staff broken down by schools.

For a breakdown of each school’s in-person and online enrollment, see below.

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