An early look at enrollment in Riley County USD 378 shows a slight decline for the fall.
Superintendent Cliff Williams shared some of the statistical data Wednesday on In Focus.
“Overall we’re at 633, which is down about 24 students. We anticipated some of this decline because we’ve had some of our larger classes graduate and just haven’t seen as many students come back,” he said.
The grade school has seen 60 new students enroll for the fall. The district is offering both in person and distance learning options for students at all levels.
“We’ve actually got about 56 students learning remotely and that number has been pretty fluent. Right now we’re about 8 percent of our student body is learning remotely,” he said.
Williams tells KMAN he expects educators to take bits and pieces of the current remote learning mode and utilize that post pandemic.
“I’ve been asked a lot if we’ll ever have a snow day again because we’re able to learn remotely. I’m not sure I want to answer that right now but we’re looking at those kinds of things. Communication has improved in areas and it’s given us more diversity,” he said.
Elementary students are also seeing some noticeable differences to things like recess and lunch.
“We did divide our playground into different sections and our maintenance department has been spraying down equipment. We purchased 150 TV trays and spread them out in our cafeteria. Those are actually on back order and so we’ve had to quarantine off part of our tables,” he said.
School began in USD 378 last week. Williams says they’ve had just one person test positive for COVID-19, but that was back in mid-summer.
Cliff Williams and USD 384 Superintendent John Cox appear the fourth Wednesday of each month on KMAN’s In Focus.
