At High-Risk For Coronavirus, Salem Plans To Start School Year With Remote Learning
SALEM (CBS) - The school reopening process is making the last weeks of summer extremely stressful for Melissa Innes.
"Staying up multiple nights, watching the school committee meeting three, four, five hours at a time," said Innes.
She now knows this fall she'll be helping her eleven-year-old twins again with remote learning.
"Last year, we were up to doing - I think it was 12 meetings a week between the two of them," said Innes.
Innes found out about Salem's back-to-school plans on Tuesday. Originally, fourth through 12th grade were going to be remote with Pre-K through third grade being held in-person.
That all changed Wednesday when the state raised the city's coronavirus risk level to high.
"It's real disappointing that we won't be able to just get them in for a while," said Salem School Committee member Mary Manning.
All students will now be remote. Manning said the goal was to at least get the younger students familiar with in-person schooling.
"If they had just been able to connect with a teacher and get some of the foundational work in both the literacy and the technology, I think it would have made the whole rest of the remote process better," said Manning.
Salem and 10 other communities are now in the red and considered high-risk.
The state updated its status Wednesday night on its new color-coded map based on positive test rates.
"It also means that we wanna make sure we're being really clear with folks about mask compliance, physical distancing and other ways to stop the transmission spread," said Salem Mayor Kim Driscoll.
