MIAMI VALLEY — New guidance from the state on how to quarantine leaves school districts hoping fewer teachers and students will miss class time.
The state now says that teachers and students do not have to quarantine after close exposure to a COVID case. However, this only applies to exposures in the classroom and if students and teachers were socially distanced and masked at the time.
Kettering City Schools is currently learning entirely online. They’re planning to have the whole district back in two weeks on Jan. 25.
Both Kettering and Beavercreek Schools are working to go through the new guidelines and understand what they means for their districts as they begin to return.
“So we’ve got some time to review the order, following the guidelines the way that the department of health wants us to follow those,” said Tyler Alexander, Fairmont High School Principle.
“What we’re hoping is, that this will cut down on the number of quarantines for both staff and students,” added Ryan Gilding, Beavercreek City Schools Public Relations.
Last week, Gov. DeWine said the guidance comes after a study involving hundreds of students and researches across the state looking into COVID exposure risk in classrooms.
One of the main goals is to prioritize children by making sure the miss as little in-person learning as possible.
“I know there is pain from kids not being able to do things with quarantine,” he said.
Reports around the state have indicated that more K-12 students are failing this year because kids are having a hard time with online learning.
“We have seen an increase in students struggling,” Alexander said.
“That’s not because of a lack of effort on anybody’s part. Our teachers are working really, really hard. Our students are working hard. Our parents are working extremely hard. As a parent of two elementary kids, this is difficult. I think we’re just built to have human interaction. Face-to-face.”
News Center 7 reached out to the Ohio Department of Education to see if they had any data about how many students are failing compared to a normal ear.
A spokesperson with the Ohio Department of Education noted that the data is not available right now, but they expect to have some stats from the fall in the coming weeks.