We 🧡 Morrow County students!
Did you know?
Students started attending school in person in Morrow County on September 14th.
Students attending schools in Irrigon, Boardman and Heppner have been in school every day since October 28th.
In grades K-6 Morrow County currently has over 80% of our enrolled students attending school in the buildings.
Teachers in Morrow County have been teaching students face-to-face and online every day!
All teachers and staff in Morrow County who wanted the COVID-19 vaccine have received both the 1st and 2nd dose.
We are ready to extend our school day until 3:00pm!
This is very exciting for Morrow County and is an option now due to a number of factors. First, we have the vast majority of our students attending on-site and we have not had any COVID-19 spread at school. All K-6 buildings have been open every day without needing to shut down a school due to exposure to the virus. Second, we are now allowed to have 28 family groups of students on the bus at a time. This is a significant increase from the beginning of the year when we could only have 20 individuals on a bus at a time. Any bus route changes will be communicated on an individual basis from your school.
Now that we are extending the school day to 3:00pm, we will be transitioning students who are remaining in distance learning to a specific distance learning teacher. This will allow teachers to focus on face-to-face instruction and the health and safety of students while at school for an extended time. And it will allow the students online to have the undivided focus of a teacher as well. You can imagine the difficulty of monitoring an entire classroom of students while at the same time trying to keep track of students online too.
This extension of the school day will require staff schedules, recess breaks, cleaning processes and meal procedures to be changed to meet the needs of students all day. Currently, in many cases staff are waiting to eat lunch until after the students get on the bus to go home at 1:00pm.
Scheduling Considerations:
Maintain high quality cleaning and disinfection of classroom surfaces
Maintain social distancing and frequent hand washing in the classroom
Maintain mask wearing in the classroom
Schedule one class in a designated outside play area at a time
Ensure students belong to very few cohort groups to limit exposure
Include recess, PE, and Music in the weekly schedule, when possible
We are so grateful to the communities in Morrow County for partnering with school staff in providing instruction to our students. We appreciate your help to assist us in meeting the requirements of the Oregon Health Authority so that students and staff remain healthy and our schools can remain open. We are so excited to get back to our new “normal” and have students at school until 3:00pm each school day starting March 29, 2021. All families who choose to remain receiving instruction online through Comprehensive Distance Learning will be notified of their child’s teacher before spring break. Thank you again and please contact your school office with any questions.
A.C. Houghton Elementary
Sam Boardman Elementary
Heppner Elementary