APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) — The Appleton School District has changed it’s back to school plans, switching from a hybrid, in-person start to the school year to an all-virtual start.
Chief Financial Officer Greg Hartjes says the move wasn’t an easy one, but after the results came back from a survey sent out to parents, asking whether or not they planned to keep students home or sent them to class, they had to change strategy.
“What we found out is that it wasn’t 35 to 40 percent of students that we’re going to stay home and go virtual,” Hartjes said. “It was only 16 percent.”
They determined they couldn’t keep up adequate social distancing measures with that many students.
“We were anticipating only about 60% of kids being in their classrooms,” Hartjes told WTAQ’s ‘The Morning News with Matt and Earl’. “But last week when we got that data that it would been more like 84% of our students, that posed considerably more challenges.”
Hartjes also cited increasing COVID-19 cases in Appleton as a reason for the shift.
“In the city of Appleton the rate of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population has now gone into the high level,” Hartjes said.
Outgamie County has an infection rate of 732.9 per 100,000.
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