The COVID-19 daily attendance plans developed over the past six weeks and shared with families last week, serve as a framework for daily attendance during a pandemic and allowed families to make informed decisions about the instructional options available in each school. Based on that input, we currently have 83% signed up for in-person instruction, 15% for digital, and the remaining 2% hybrid.

Moving forward, we will refer to the plans released on July 8 as the BASE PLAN.

We speak frequently in the base plan about the need to be responsive to the ever-changing landscape. Our strategy is to start with the base plans delivered last week and move to a 100% digital model or a staggered attendance model, only as needed. At times, we may have more than one model active at the same time. For example, one school or one grade span may be on a staggered attendance schedule, while the others are operating from the base plan.

Decisions to take more restrictive actions will be determined by the culmination of data impacting a school, group of schools, or the entire district. The primary metrics driving the decision will be (1) attendance rates of staff and students, (2) new case counts in Blount County (i.e., 14-day average number of new cases per 100,000 residents), and (3) active cases in Blount County (represented as a percent of the total county population).

Our plan for the year is to announce any modifications affecting attendance no later than Wednesday of the previous week to give parents and staff time to adjust. Under IMPORTANT CHANGES below, you will see that we are employing a staggered start for the first two days of school, July 30 and July 31. Future communication about changes that differ from the base plan will be released on Wednesday of the week before the effective date.