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Date: 12/21/2021
LUDLOW – During the Ludlow School Committee’s Dec. 14 meeting, the committee discussed School Choice and a rising number of COVID-19 cases across the district.
With the committee set to approve the School Choice number for the next school year, Interim Superintendent Lisa Nemeth discussed how the money raised from the program is spent.
“Those funds across the district are put into a school choice account and they are used for our technology funding for the Chromebooks, the projectors, the Smartboards or anything like that. We get money from the community sending them to Ludlow,” she said.
School Committee Vice Chair James Harrington said one of the challenges of School Choice is juggling the number of incoming students with current classroom sizes.
“The balance is trying to coordinate that classroom size so that you can maintain a reasonable, productive classroom size without overwhelming a teacher. When say 10 seniors who are school choice graduate, the superintendent will talk to the administrators and figure out where best could those slots fit without having a negative impact,” he said.
Despite having 107 slots, Nemeth said only 71 slots are filled.
Committee Chair Michael Kelliher said that the smaller number is because of the class size problem.
“We do not just take 107 because we can, we only put them in where it makes sense to do so and would not impact class sizes or other issues with our infrastructure,” he said.
To start her COVID-19 report, Nemeth said case counts were continuing to rise across the district.
“As we know the numbers are increasing across every single week, so I am still sending out weekly emails. Two weeks ago, we had 11 students who tested positive, last week was 24 and since [Dec. 11] – today is only [Dec. 14] – we have had 17 students that have tested positive,” she said.
Because of the increasing number of cases, the district’s nursing staff is stretched thin.
“We are still seeing a huge increase, which America and many school systems are seeing right now. Our nursing staff is overwhelmed, we have actually had to not shut down the nurse’s office due to contact tracing but to say to only send students in emergencies,” Nemeth said.
Nemeth added some teachers have had to help with contact tracing as well.
“The amount of contact tracing we are doing is enormous and that is really what is bogging us down. We have had a lot of help from teachers that may have a free period or secretaries but with the numbers increasing it is very difficult to keep up this pace for our nursing staff,” she said.
With the increasing numbers, Nemeth encouraged parents to sign their children up for the test and stay program.
Kelliher said the positive cases can have a significant impact on learning and socialization time for students.
“We saw this last year, so I am not terribly surprised, but it is important if your child is not feeling well to keep them home and not send them to school. Whenever you have 20 kids that tested positive there is a lot of contact tracing and kids that are close that have to be dealt with either through test and stay and quarantining so it is going to have a big impact on kids missing days,” he said. “The most important thing this year is keeping our kids in school. Hopefully we can get throughout this, and this will be the last winter of this nightmare.”
The Ludlow School Committee will next meet on Jan. 11 and coverage of that meeting will appear in the Jan. 20 edition of The Reminder.