Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
REARDAN—Students in the school district here are studying from home this week as surging COVID-19 cases caused by the Omicron variant forced district leadership to elect for a remote learning model this week.
Reardan had 188 of its roughly 690 students miss school last Friday due to either being positive for coronavirus or being in close contact with a positive case. The school leadership team elected to be remote for the 3.5 days of scheduled school this week on Monday morning, which was a no-school day due to Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“The last thing we want to do is go remote,” Reardan superintendent Eric Sobotta said. “But with the number of cases in the district, being in-person this week just wasn’t possible.”
The virus isn’t just hitting the students. Nine staff tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week and several others haven’t been able to gather due to suffering from virus symptoms.
The good news for the district is that online attendance numbers have been higher than expected.
“As best I can tell, our staff is doing as well as they can,” Sobotta said. “But what’s weighing on them is the number of positive cases and the virus’s spread.”
Most district employees have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
121 new COVID-19 cases were reported in Lincoln County in the last two weeks. Thus far, 26 people in the county have died from the virus in the past 22 months since the pandemic began.
Cases in Lincoln County began to sharply rise after Christmas due to the spread of the Omicron variant and haven’t tapered downward yet, but recent nationwide data indicates that the surge in cases may be slowing down soon.
Drew Lawson is the editor of the Davenport Times. He is a graduate of Eastern Washington University.
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