Better prepared for second semester

NEW LONDON - After a semester with students in the classroom, New London Community School District Superintendent Chad Wahls said the district is even more prepared to navigate providing education during a pandemic heading into the second semester.

Like other districts, Wahls said the beginning of the school year was filled with unknowns. The superintendent said the district worked closely with Henry County Public Health before reopening its doors in August, creating partitions on shared tables and measuring socially distanced spaces between student desks among other mitigation measures.

'The unknown was: Would it work?” he said.

For the most part, the district was able to avoid quarantining large numbers of students. Wahls said new guidance on the use of masks and quarantining helped schools with fewer student quarantines. But even before the change, the most students New London had in quarantine at any one time was six students.

'The first four or five weeks were challenging. Then we started getting comfortable with things,” Wahls said.

Like other districts, Wahls said one of the biggest challenges New London faced was finding substitute teachers to fill in for staff who were out due to pandemic-related reasons.

'We were treading water for a while with having enough subs,” he said.

To help with the shortage, the district sent every staff member with an associate of arts degree to take a class through the Great Prairie Area Education Agency, which would provide the necessary certification for those staff members to be able to sub for classes.

'We're prepared if we have to go through that again. We see a lot of other schools struggling that way, too. It's not only the kids, sometimes it's not having the teachers to keep buildings open,” Wahls said.

The other area the district faced some challenges with was extracurricular activities, specifically with sport spectators.

'Through the sports season, we did see a little bit of a rise in cases within our volleyball program, not with students but with our parents,” Wahls said.

The superintendent added he understood the move from the state, which mandated only two spectator tickets be allotted for each athlete to help mitigate spread at those events. Wahls added being a little stricter on enforcing social distancing and mask wearing at sporting and other extracurricular events is the one thing he would have changed going into the fall semester.

'[The state] gave spectators a change to do it the right way and they didn't do it to the best of their abilities so they had to tighten down,” he said.

With a new proclamation from the governor expected to come in the next several days, the superintendent said he is interested to see whether restrictions will be loosened and to what degree.

'Will middle school sports start back up? Will there be more than two spectators?” the superintendent asked of potential changes.

Wahls added the success of the semester would not have been possible without the support of his school board and the teachers, parents and students of the district.

'We've been very fortunate, and we're taking every day, one step at a time. We've all been on the same page. It's been a crazy year but a good year for everybody,” he said.