Manhattan Beach Unified School District will fully reopen schools for in-person instruction easyreadernews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from easyreadernews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The reopening of in-person classroom instruction within the Manhattan Beach Unified School District and all area schools has been suspended due to the surge in COVID-19 cases occurring throughout Los Angeles County.
Superintendent Mike Matthews issued an unusual Sunday night message to the MBUSD parent community announcing the change in plans. The school board had held a special meeting on December 31 in which the date for reopening was moved from January 5 to January 13.
“Since then, two of our elementary-aged child care cohorts are not in school due to two cases of COVID in those classrooms,”
Matthews wrote in his Sunday night message. “And while there is no evidence of spread so far, which has been the case in all of our classrooms, these two incidents bring our case total to 34 since we returned to campus on September 16, 2020. That’s a big number, and it reflects the number of cases in our community.” Matthews said that Los Angeles County Department of Public Health
A lesson in patience:
A lesson in patience: Despite County Health Department approval to allow transitional kindergarten through second grade students to return to campus, the Hermosa Beach School Board voted this week to delay returning young students to campus until Jan. 13. Photo
The five elementary schools of the Manhattan Beach Unified School District welcomed back their youngest students this week. But the Manhattan Beach Middle School’s program for high needs students was shut down due to three COVID-19 cases.
On Sunday, MBUSD sent out a letter to parents with kids at MBMS informing them that three positive COVID-19 cases had been discovered that had a connection with the campus.
In-person learning began for the youngest students at Pennekamp Elementary and other MBUSD elementary schools on Tuesday. Photo courtesy MBUSD
In-person learning began for the youngest students at Pennekamp Elementary and other MBUSD elementary schools on Tuesday. Photo courtesy MBUSD
Tuesday was the first day of school at Pennekamp Elementary, and Principal Karina Gerger noticed something was very different than years past. It wasn’t the fact that all the kids wore masks, though of course that was different. It wasn’t even the plexiglass-equipped desks and the handwashing stations in every classroom, though that too was something brand new.