Parents, staff support in-person school; split opinions on mask rules

Parents with school-aged children in the Luverne district want in-person classes to resume this fall — as long as the environment is safe.
Results from an online survey by Luverne school administrators showed 75 percent of parents supported in-person instruction with common sense measures for safety.
Other families, given the choice, responded that they preferred hybrid classes (17.7 percent supported combined in-person and distance learning on every other day or week basis) or distance learning (7.3 percent liked the learning from home through virtual methods).
Survey results were released to parents and the public last week.
Luverne Middle School Principal Jason Phelps organized the district survey that was sent to parents of kindergarten through 12th-grade students.
“As we move closer to the start of school, we may reassess parents’ feelings toward the return to school,” Phelps wrote to parents.
The survey, made available to parents over a two-week period, drew 509 responses that represented 1,003 students, or roughly 80 percent of the district’s 1,200 students.
Respondents were asked to complete one survey per family.
A similar survey was conducted with district staff.
“We can report that roughly 97 percent of staff responded that they would return to school if we began in-person learning five days a week,” Superintendent Craig Oftedahl wrote in the letter to parents.
Since mid-July Luverne administrators have met with staff and discussed instruction models that state education officials asked each district to prepare to implement on Sept. 8 at the start of the 2020-21 school year.
At the July 23 Luverne School Board meeting, Phelps outlined what has occurred locally.
“A lot of what we are looking at is what other schools are doing and how they are handling the three different models and thinking about the different ways we will have to work around logistical concerns when we start,” he said.
“We’ve looked at every possible way to do our regular business.”
A statewide mandate to wear facemasks indoors at public facilities (and outdoors when social distancing in public is difficult) went into effect Saturday.
In the school survey weeks prior to the state’s mask mandate, 54.2 percent of respondents indicated they would not support the mandated use of facemasks for students while 45.8 percent said they would.
Oftedahl told school board members that since the survey was completed, the number of positive coronavirus cases has climbed in Rock County to include several positive cases among school-aged children.
Currently school officials are waiting for Gov. Walz to make an announcement as to what model schools can operate under this fall.
Oftedahl outlined the importance of the state’s decision in his letter to parents.
“The information that comes from the state will be one of the most influential factors in what our local plans will be,” Oftedahl wrote. “Until that guidance is provided, much of our local planning will be very general.”
Gov. Walz is scheduled to provide schools with a specific recommendation and guidelines Thursday, July 30.