Ocean City issues call to action for holidays, ties it to full in-school learning
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY — The Ocean City Board of Education wants to get students back to in-person learning as of Feb. 1.
To do that, the board announced a “call to action” last week. The plea is to convince “the entire school community” to practice COVID-19 safety protocols through the holidays to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus.
That transmission has been increasing throughout southern New Jersey and the rest of the state and nation. The number of cases and quarantines have increased in the district as well. (See related story, this edition.)
School officials have noted that transmission of the coronavirus is extremely low within schools, a point Gov. Phil Murphy made recently when asked if he planned to put more restrictions on in-person learning. He has given individual districts the power of determining how they educate students.
New Jersey school districts went to all-remote learning in mid-March at the start of the pandemic and continued that through the end of the 2019-20 school year, but many students returned to school at the beginning of September.
Ocean City schools have been working on a hybrid schedule — two days in school and three days remote learning — since then and many extracurricular activities, including interscholastic sports, were limited this past fall. The rise in COVID-19 cases even prompted the governor, in concert with the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, to postpone the winter sports season until the new year, with various winter sports seasons not beginning until the end of January, mid-February or even March.
When those sports do resume, spectators will not be allowed to watch games in person.
Health officials and the governor have repeatedly noted that much of the spread of COVID-19 among students has happened during gatherings, such as parties, outside school. Similarly, they have warned against large gatherings of any type during the holidays.
The school board is following suit.
In the news release issued last week, school board member Dr. Patrick Kane, a medical doctor who is chairman of the school district’s COVID-19 Task Force, was the face of the plea to reinforce that information.
“We, as the board, are echoing CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) information and right now, the numbers are showing that the majority of this illness is being spread outside of school,” Kane wrote in the release. “The rate of transmission in schools is low.
“I’m asking that everyone make a positive contribution to help keep our community safe, especially with the holidays coming up.”
The call to action is to continue social distancing, avoid large gatherings, wear masks and practice good hand hygiene.
Following the COVID-19 protocols would be “the greatest gift of all this holiday season and would give the district the best possible chance to move to full in-school learning by February 2021,” Kane said.
“Our main goal,” he added, “is and will continue to be to keep schools open, and with this effort, we hope for full in-school learning by Feb. 1, 2021. Ultimately, our community will be a huge deciding factor in how teaching will go in the new year. It’s really a group effort in and outside of school.”
Kane referred students and parents to the COVID-19 update page on the school website, oceancityschools.org.