After the pandemic hit, the largest school district in Kansas set to calculating how much outdoor air it should pull into its buildings. Wichita Public
Like a lot of other rural Kansas districts, Smoky Valley Unified School District 400 had already been dealing with the pitfalls of declining enrollment when one of the most disruptive years in the history of Kansas education started.
Covering a 395.5-square-mile footprint, the district isn’t actually that big, at least in comparison to other mammoth districts covering swaths of the state. USD 400, centered around the charming little town of Lindsborg halfway between McPherson and Salina, had been steadily losing students since a peak of 1,600 students in fall 2017, mostly as jobs became more difficult to find, said district business manager Julie Martin.
The Kansas State Department of Education now recommends the state s school districts allow middle and high school students to return to five-day-a-week, in-person classes if certain health precautions are followed.
Speaking to the Kansas State Board of Education, Randy Watson, education commissioner, said that a group of health professionals including representatives from KU Wichita Pediatrics, the Kansas Academy of Family Physicians and Kansas Chapter American Academy of Pediatrics has consistently agreed that schools main goal should be to bring students back to as much in-person learning as possible.
The debate, then, has been on how to do that safely.
But after discussions held since November and recent studies on the transmission of COVID-19 in secondary schools, Watson said that group s consensus is now that middle and high school students can reopen safely if schools follow certain safety procedures.