SPRINGFIELD â Like many parents in the summer of 2020, Donna Skelton was curious as to how her local school district, Ball-Chatham, would navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall.
She and her husband Terry are working parents of two children, 10-year-old Adrianne and 8-year-old Addison. After spending the spring of 2020 working through the district s online learning, she awaited the plan for returning kids full-time to the classroom. Chatham was looking at several different things, Skelton said. They weren t set on something, it kept changing (and) everybody was trying to figure out something that worked.
Eventually, the Ball-Chatham School Board decided to begin the 2020-21 school year with a hybrid model where students would attend in-person for half the day on certain days. However, the Skelton children would still have had to do some virtual learning, an option that wasn t the best for the family.