Sumner County Schools begin in-person, virtual classes

GALLATIN, Tenn. (WTVF) — Sumner County students are getting up early for the first day of school, but things are looking a lot different this year.

For those students who did not opt for virtual learning this year, everyone with a last name that begins with "A through K" will start flooding the hallways of schools on Monday.

During the first two weeks of school, students will be in the classroom for two days and learn from home the other three days. Of course, parents still had the option to allow their child to completely learn from home.

However, remote learning isn't going to be perfect because right now the district needs 30,000 total laptops but only has 11,800.

NewsChannel5 talked with a mother of two who said she had to buy laptops for her two daughters.

"Their education is important but their health is important as well," said Paulette Blakemore. One of her daughters is in high school and the other middle. Blakemore said she didn't want to put them in school in person because she's pregnant with her third child.

"I'm much more worried about how many times a day is a door handle going to be touched? How many times will someone have to clean them? You have to think about all of that."

Blakemore said her children couldn't access the online courses this morning. She had to take off work to try to figure out what was wrong. She went to the Sumner County Board of Education for help.

School leaders will be monitoring the next two weeks closely. If everything goes smoothly, every person in Pre-K through fifth grade will return to school full time, while other grades continue on the hybrid schedule.

"The idea was to sort of start out with a smaller amount of students so that we could teach new routines, teach new rules so we would be able to assess the kids and we also have a completely 100% virtual class that began today," said Sumner County Schools Communications Director Jeremy Johnson.

Scott Langford, the Assistant Director for Instruction, is asking parents to be patient while they figure out what works best this year.

"Once we start having children in the buildings and start looking at things, I can promise you that your principals are going to look, and teachers are going to look and they're going to figure out exactly the best ways to do things,” said Langford.

On Friday, Sumner County's mask mandate was extended through the end of this month, meaning the school district has to require everyone in middle and high school to wear a mask. Kids in elementary school are encouraged to wear one.

Schools have also installed plexiglass in the building and are trying to control the flow of student foot traffic.