Students in the Trigg County School System will return to in-person learning Monday with the choice of virtual learning still offered.
Superintendent Bill Thorpe stressed that students need to be in the classroom as much as possible and that the school district has a responsibility to the students and their education.
Trigg County, like most school districts in the state, has been on a virtual platform exclusively since Governor Andy Beshear recommended schools go to virtual learning in the wake of a rise in COVID-19 cases.
Thorpe said there have been no known cases of transmittance of the virus within the schools and cases among staff and students have been significantly higher since students have been in the virtual platform.
The state uses an incidence rate formula that takes the seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases and normalizes it based on 100,000 population. Trigg County’s five-day incidence rate average before Beshear’s recommendation to send the kids home in November was 32.4. The county’s average incidence rate from Saturday to Wednesday was 42.9 which is consistent with other school districts across the state who had strong COVID-19 protocols in place to help slow the mitigation of the virus but have seen the incidence rate rise in their county since November.
According to the state’s COVID-19 reporting website, there have been 17 students and 16 staff in the school district infected with the virus since classes resumed in September. This week, the state reported three new cases involving Trigg students and two new cases involving staff. There are 17 students and one staff member under quarantine.
Thorpe said the school district will continue to enforce strict Healthy at School guidelines for all staff and students while on campus, as well as extensive cleaning and sanitizing of all school areas as required.
Thorpe also requested parents to not send their child to school if they are showing any symptoms of COVID-19 or have been in contact with a positive case in the past 48 hours. Parents are also asked to send their child to school with a clean face mask that fits their child and encourage them to wear the mask properly.
