Gov. Jared Polis created a new group this week to come up with a strategy to safely reopen more schools to-in person learning next year. Many districts across Colorado recently switched to remote learning because of a spike in COVID-19 cases.
Districts in the Roaring Fork Valley have moved between in-person and remote learning since the start of the school year, depending on known cases among staff or students in accordance with safety protocols from the state.
Polis said the goal is to get back to in-person learning in January with less interruptions and quarantines.
"We know that not only do parents depend on it," he said, "but frankly we can’t let the future of our kids become yet another casualty of this pandemic."
The 15 people on the task force include superintendents, public health officials, teachers and parents from around the state. Colorado is also offering fifteen million dollars in grants to help school districts get back to in person learning.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment also released an update of the decision-support tools for educators, to aid them in determining who needs to quarantine after an exposure in the classroom or school setting. This update standardizes the protocol no matter the Dial phase of the county. Those updates can be found here.
