While COVID-19 cases are still soaring at an all-time high following the holiday season, the Chesterfield County School Board has announced that the elementary level cohorts, two and three, will begin to phase back to in-person learning on February 1. They officially announced these changes after the school board meeting on Tuesday, January 12, where the board voted 4-1 in favor of allowing schools to reopen. As of January 14, the current school board plan is to allow students in the first three cohorts to attend school five days a week. The school board hasn’t reopened cohort four, middle and high schools, yet, but they will hold a meeting on February 9 to decide if they should allow the fourth cohort to return to in-person learning.

The school board continues to use the student re-entry plan, Project Restart, which is the same plan that they used to move schools to the hybrid model in November 2020. Now, though, Chesterfield has updated the plan, taking into account new information about COVID-19, including transmission rates in schools. The school board has decided that students attend school five days a week. This means that they plan on removing the asynchronous day on Wednesday, which was used to clean the schools and give students a chance to catch up. They plan to take away this day due to the idea that not all students were taking advantage of the extra help and work time.

To measure whether students and teachers should return to school, the Chesterfield County school board is using the Center of Diseases Controls (CDC) metric scale. These metrics measure total COVID-19 cases per 100k residents, positivity rates, and the ability to use mitigation strategies. Currently, both the COVID-19 cases per 100k and positivity rate are measured to be at the highest risk, but the mitigation strategies are at the lower risk. In addition to the CDC metric, the deciding factor is the fact that scientists have proven that schools aren’t super-spreaders, so the chance that students will catch the virus remains low. There were 220 cases of COVID-19 in Virginia schools, which is fewer than 1% of the student and staff population. Although this percentage is low, most schools were only open for a month in hybrid models before being shut down prior to the holiday season.

For more information about project restart visit:

• Project Restart – Update Jan. 12, 2021
• CCPS officially plans to start reopening schools