COMAL COUNTY, Texas — Tuesday it was Comal ISD’s turn to welcome students back to class.
The district covers ten communities and has nearly 25,000 students.
Many returned to school in-person.
The buses are clean and social distancing stickers are positioned.
CISD has been getting ready for this day, for months.
“Everybody across our district has worked really hard and particularly our custodians, our bus drivers, our maintenance personnel who have really been working hard to get our facilities and our transportation up and running and ready for the first day,” said Steve Stanford, a CISD spokesperson. “Of course, our teachers, our counselors, our campus administrators, they've done a really great job also of getting the schools ready and prepared for the arrival of students."
Stanford said August 25th has been the target start date since January. In April, the district made sure to get an early start to ordering necessary supplies.
“One of the first things we did back in April was to identify that we would need lots of cleaning supplies and lots of PPE gear,” said Stanford. “Early on in the summer, late spring, we started ordering that stuff and getting it distributed out to campuses because we know that's going to be really important this year.”
The Coronavirus pandemic has all districts adapting and getting very familiar with the technology.
Roughly 12,000 CISD students, or 41%, are learning remotely.
A note sent to parents Tuesday after some students couldn’t see their google classroom or had an invalid code reassured them that attendance won’t be counted against students until all tech issues are resolved.
“We're not having any outages at all. Our systems are up and working,” said Stanford. “We are, however, just seeing some individual situations where there's some log in issues and things like that. We have a help desk that we're helping work people through.”
For the 59% who are on campus, masks, hand sanitizer and lots of elbow room are the new normal.
As in years past, school resource officers are also in place.
“They're just an integral part of our campus and keeping kids safe,” said Stanford. “We really appreciate what they do for us and throughout the year.”
Communication is a big focus this year.
A plan has been made for contacting classes and schools if a Coronavirus case is confirmed.
An online portal that’s open to the public shows how many active cases are reported in the district.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the four active cases in the district were listed at Canyon High School.
“It doesn't matter what year it is, there's always little things that happen the first day that you’ve just got to work out; making sure everybody gets to the right place at the right time, getting schedule fixes, transportation and all those things,” said Stanford. “That's normal to see every year. Obviously, with the overlay of COIVD-19 on top of things, there's more moving parts. There are issues to work out but overall, as a system, we're doing very well today.”
As all 30 schools get into the swing of things, parents, students, and teachers are taking a breath and starting this journey together.