Roughly 4,100 students in Fairfax County Public Schools will return to fully-remote learning Monday as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations surge in the region.
These students — including special education students and English language learnings — had returned to classrooms part-time in October.
“We know this is a disappointment to our families,” the district said in a statement. “We understand that in-person learning is the best option for most students.”
The district said it hopes to have these students resume hybrid learning after the winter break.
School officials have used two key metrics to guide reopening decisions: the positive test rate (percentage of total tests that come back positive) and the number of new cases per 100,000 residents. Fairfax County’s positive test rate for coronavirus has now been above 10% for seven days.
Fairfax students had been returning to the classroom in phases. But the district had already sent one group of nearly 3,000 students back to fully remote learning and delayed another group of close to 6,000 students’ initial return.
Nearly 1,400 students will continue to receive in-person instruction, according to information on the FCPS website.
Fairfax County is also planning for the next semester. In a tentative plan laid out to the school board Thursday, all students would begin the first week of school virtually. Groups would return to the classroom in phases between Jan. 12 and Feb. 2, according to the presentation.
The district is also proposing new more lenient grading policies, after a troubling report showed a rise in failing grades during the pandemic.
Fairfax is not the only Northern Virginia school district to scale back its reopening plans as the pandemic worsens. Loudoun County Public Schools announced last week that it would go to all-virtual learning starting this Tuesday. Fauquier County, which was the first local school district to offer the majority of its students a hybrid learning model, will also resume fully-remote learning Monday. Other local districts, like Arlington, had only allowed a small number of students to begin hybrid learning.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced new coronavirus restrictions on Thursday, including a curfew between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m.
The Virginia Education Association called for schools throughout the commonwealth to close until the pandemic improves, but Northam has left those decisions up to local leaders.
“As I have said since the beginning of this pandemic, we have enormous diversity of school districts within our Commonwealth — a one-size-fits-all solution simply does not make sense,” Northam said in a statement, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
