At a meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, the Mingus Union High School District Governing Board voted 4-1 to resume partial in-person education for high school students beginning on Thursday, Sept. 17. Board Member Anthony Lozano was the lone dissenting vote.
According to the plan approved by the board, only half of students would be attending class on any given day, determined by the first letter of their last name, with the remaining students following along with their advising group remotely from home as they have for the past few weeks. Mingus Union High School Principal Genie Gee said that she expected that the division would be students whose last names start with A to those whose names start with L in one group and those whose last names start with M through Z in the second group, but that it had not yet been finalized,
The intention of not having more than 16 students out of a 25-student group in class at any one time.
“[Students will be] as distanced as we can possibly get in a classroom,” Gee said at the meeting. “Everyone in the entire building will be masked up, no exceptions.”
Parents who do not feel comfortable sending their children into Mingus Union High School in-person will still have the option of continuing online learning for the foreseeable future. MUHSD Superintendent Mike Westcott urged parents to continue to do their best to screen their children for signs of the virus before sending them to school.
The hybrid learning plan is temporary, and the board stated its the hope that COVID-19 infection benchmarks will continue to improve in the near future and allow the district to return to more fully in-person education, though Westcott stressed the continuing uncertainty of the situation.
“There is no one who can predict how long this will last, whether there will be an increase in creativity or decrease,” Westcott said. “All we have is trends.”
According the Arizona Governor’s Office, the benchmarks are meant as guidelines only and are not mandated by any state agency, so school boards can vote to reopen whenever they want.
The benchmarks set forth by ADHS for Yavapai County are well below the the levels recommended for reopening. Students in the nearby Camp Verde Unified School District returned to class nearly a month ago, on Monday, Aug. 17. Students in the Sedona-Oak Creek School District returned to classes on Monday, Aug. 24. Mingus Union is the last high school district in the Verde Valley to vote to re-open based on the same metrics as Camp Verde High School and Sedona Red Rock High School.
According to state benchmarks released by the Arizona Department of Health Services, all three schools are relying on the same numbers to determine when to re-open, the numbers for Yavapai County.
