Fairfield schools move to full online learning

Beginning today, all students in the Fairfield school district will move to online learning.

Superintendent Laurie Noll made the announcement about the move to full online learning on Friday.

'When I looked at the matrices we had in place, we were trending toward going online,” Noll said.

State guidelines require that a county's positivity rate must be over 20 percent and district absenteeism to be greater than 10 percent.

If a district resides in more than one county, the county with the highest positivity rate is used.

The Fairfield district serves students in five counties - Jefferson, Van Buren, Henry, Washington and Wapello counties.

In three of those counties - Van Buren, Henry and Wapello counties - the positivity rate is at 20.5 percent, 20.9 percent and 25.1 percent respectively.

Noll reported that district absenteeism ranges from 2-4.5 percent for students and 4-11.5 percent for staff.

'We've had staff out, and we're not able to sustain the level of supervision and staff that we need,” Noll said. 'We've had people going to other buildings. With that, it makes it very hard to sustain.”

Noll explained that the district has a two-day waiver before getting approval to move online from the Department of Education.

She said that regardless of the state's decision, the district will continue with online learning through the end of this week.

'We'll be watching the numbers this next week,” Noll said. 'If the numbers continue to go up, we'll apply again.”

With students already scheduled to be off on Thanksgiving week, the district has that as a cushion to evaluate the situation.

Basketball practices were scheduled to begin this week.

Noll said that the state has said that any district going to 100 percent online learning is not allowed to have any students participating in extracurricular activities.

The Fairfield school district started the school year with a hybrid model, with students attending in-person classes half of the time.

The elementary schools moved to full-time, in-person learning in October.

There were plans to move the middle and high school students to full-time in-person learning in late October, but those plans were delayed as COVID numbers began to increase.

A week ago, Noll announced plans to move the elementary schools back to a hybrid model this week, but Friday's announcement superseded that plan.