Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
Ironwood — All Ironwood students who have signed up for in-person learning are now attending the Luther L. Wright K-12 School five days a week after the district completed its transition away from a hybrid model for its upper grades this week.
Part of the district’s plan for teaching during the coronavirus pandemic was to have its 7-12 grade students who signed up for in-person learning attend school on a hybrid model where the grades were split into two groups that alternated between going to the school and learning remotely over the course of each week.
“We needed to (adopt the hybrid model) because of the number of kids we have in each grade, the size of our classrooms and our 7-12 (grades) are all on the third floor,” Ironwood Superintendent Travis Powell said, adding there are still students who opted to learn entirely remotely.
Powell said the district began to phase out the model and now the majority of the students are back in their classrooms, with the rest attending the district remotely.
“So we started with seventh grade and then we added eighth grade five days a week. We’ve added a grade each week — bringing them back five days a week — and this week … the 11th and 12th graders were the last group to return,” Powell said.
“Now, we have some students (in) K-12 that are fully remote, and we have the majority of students (in) K-12 that are fully in-person,” he said. “We don’t have anybody that is part-time one or the other.”
Powell said several factors — including staff vaccinations, concerns over the social and emotional well being of students who feel less connected when learning remotely, and relatively low COVID case counts locally — played a role in the district’s decision to return to in-person learning for the entire week.
“The number of COVID cases in the community have been relatively low since the start of the second semester,” Powell said.
He added the district had wanted to try the transition earlier in the school year, but a local rise in COVID cases halted those plans.
There were 17 active cases in Gogebic County as of Monday, according to the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department’s Facebook update, with a total of 1,259 total positive and probable cases, and 47 deaths in the county over the course of the pandemic.
Ontonagon County had eight active cases as of Monday, according to the WUPHD, as well as 410 positive and probable cases, and 20 deaths.
Although COVID remains a concern for the district, Powell said the concern over student wellness means the return to the classroom is taking precedent and that the district’s other COVID-19 precautions remain in place.
“The mask situation is the same, the cohorting of classes at the elementary level is the same, the (elementary) students eat in their classrooms … so we don’t have the congregation in the cafeteria,” he said. “The whole plan we put together is the same, we’ve just found we can adjust the number of students (in grades) 7-12 safely. We weren’t sure we could at first, so we had the hybrid. We’ve learned we can have more students in the building, so so far so good.”
