Preparations to Return to School in September

Dr. Cascone is discussing with the West Orange Administration about potentially making a plan to go back to school this upcoming school year in September.

They have held meetings discussing key planning towards considering technology, curriculum, food services, and other topics. With September only three months away, Dr. Cascone doesn’t want to discuss immediate plans towards going back to school as he believes they should not  “get too far ahead of themselves.” 

By the end of June, Governor Phil Murphy should give all New Jersey schools’ what the regulation is going to be in September.

If they do have guidelines where students have to stay 6 ft away from each other in classrooms, this could lead to limiting the amount of students in the school. There would have to be some sort of schedule where students come for certain days to school to take precautions of not spreading any bacteria around.

In our WO township, there seems to be a decrease in the number of cases of COVID-19. This is one step ahead towards possibly going “back to normal”, since the numbers were higher back in March and April.

Some teachers have come back to their classrooms to clean up and students should clean up their locker no later than June 30 that way the cleaning staff can start to clean the whole buildings. Make sure to follow the WO school page on social media for any alerts of clean up days.

With summer coming up, Dr. Cascone called all summer enrichment programs to be canceled and summer programs were to be held off for now. This raises questions as to what is going to happen with fall sports?

Tryouts for fall sports usually happen around early August but this year, it could be different. According to the National Federation for school athletics, they have a 30-page document of what the complex guidelines are if sports were to be taken into action this year. This affects football and soccer season, which are two sports that have people come in contact with each other. The state of NJ even recommends that the fall season flips with the spring season. 

Though we don’t know what is going to happen from here to September, hopefully some sort of plans of returning to school would be in effect soon.