Chamberlain is moving its middle school and high school classes to eLearning for Sept. 22-25 due to the high number of absent staff.
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Stanley County
While he did not specify how many staff members are being quarantined or if any had tested positive for COVID-19, Stanley County superintendent Daniel Hoey did note that the district is "no longer unaffected by COVID."
"If you have a number of staff who are out and you can't substitute back for them, an adjustment needs to be made," he said. "It's something that all school districts in the state of South Dakota have had to deal with… The blunt reality is there aren't enough subs and when you get to the point where the need in the classroom or in the support positions is greater than what you can sub for, you need to make a transition or a decision. That's really what drove us."
Stanley County, which canceled classes for Monday, plans to resume traditional classes on Oct. 1. "That's a question I can't answer with 100 percent certainty, but I trust that that will be the case," Hoey said of resuming classes next Wednesday.
"We have to be reasonable and follow the precautions that are recommended or we're going to get ourselves in the cycle where we're here for a couple weeks, off for a couple weeks, then back for a couple weeks," he continued. "First and foremost, it's a staff issue, but the other is we want to give it a cooling-off period where we can hopefully come back healthy and stay in school."
Located in Fort Pierre, Stanley County has a K-12 enrollment of approximately 400 students, according to the Department of Education.
As of Monday, there are seven active cases in Stanley County indicating "moderate" community spread, per the state health department. Just across the Missouri River, Hughes County currently has 158 active cases.
Pierre High School, which is located 3.6 miles away from Stanley County High, canceled classes last Friday after roughly 15 high school students tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 150 others were asked to quarantine, according to superintendent Kelly Glodt.
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While the two are close in proximity, Hoey said it would be "difficult at best, but probably impossible" to establish if there is a direct correlation in the number of cases between the two communities.
"Dr. Glodt and I would say jointly that we are one population area with the Missouri River that goes between us," Hoey said. "There's an incredible amount of fluidity between the two communities, and we know that at the best of times and in the challenging times. It's not something you could answer definitively, but I think logically speaking, there's a lot of shared resources between the two communities."
With the school in distance learning, Stanley County has suspended all extracurricular activities, with plans to resume on Oct. 2. Additionally, homecoming festivities have been pushed back to Oct. 5-9.
This news impacts at least five sporting events, including a football game Sept. 25 at Wagner. The Buffaloes, who are 2-2 in Class 11B, were scheduled to play nine games this season after filling their Week 2 bye with a game against Bennett County.
The volleyball team, which will miss two matches (Sept. 24 at Potter County; Oct. 1 vs. Sunshine Bible Academy), was scheduled to host a tournament last Saturday, but the event was postponed according to the school website.
"One of the critical things this year is flexibility," Hoey said. "We purposefully did not use the term 'canceled,' because we wanted to maintain that flexibility to hopefully get those events rescheduled as we are able."
Hoven School District
The Hoven School District, which canceled classes Monday and Tuesday, will begin transitioning its students, grades 7-12, to flex and e-learning after four students tested positive for COVID-19 with another test pending as of Sunday, according to superintendent Jeremy Hurd.
In a video update published Sunday, Hurd said the first positive test came back Friday. They then received information of a student who was a close contact of another student in the Gettysburg School District. That Hoven student was tested and also returned positive. Shortly thereafter two more students who believed they were in close contact with a positive case got tested. They also tested positive.
Hurd said he conducted contact tracing over the weekend and identified 21 total close contacts.
There are not any positive cases or confirmed close contacts within the elementary school, according to Hurd. If that remains the case, they may return to school with elementary students only as early as Wednesday.
"This is impacting one of our high school classes a little bit more than the rest," Hurd said. "The number of students who were potentially going to be out of school, especially in the secondary, was going to be very high. That's what really led to making the decision to close school for the next couple days."
Located in Potter County, Hoven has a K-12 enrollment of approximately 100 students, according to the Department of Education.
The Hoven School District, which is in a co-op with Gettysburg for football, volleyball and cross country, has postponed all activities for this week. Friday's football game vs. Herreid/Selby has been moved to Oct. 2.
"I hope that the community, the school, the parents and everybody has empathy for this situation," Hurd said. "This is something that is going to be ongoing. This won't be the last students or staff members potentially that are going to be positive cases. This is only the beginning of something that we're going to have to deal with for the entire school year."
Chamberlain superintendent Justin Zajic confirmed Monday that the school will be transitioning to distance learning for the remainder of the week due to the spread of COVID-19 within the middle school and high school, particularly among staff members.
"The tipping point was we could not provide a solid education to the students at the middle school and high school with the number of staff out," he said.
25 percent of the Chamberlain MS/HS staff had either tested positive, had children quarantining or were awaiting a test result, according to Zajic. "At that point, we don't have subs to fill the building," he continued. "Our teachers today were patch-working the subs for everybody else, but that's not a sustainable model."
Zajic said contact tracing is underway as they try to determine the source of the outbreak. They will re-evaluate the situation and make a determination on when in-person classes will resume later this week.
"Some of positive cases will be off of isolation this week, so the percentage won't be as high," Zajic said. "We should be able to come back next week."
All Chamberlain extracurricular activities scheduled between Sept. 21-25 have been either canceled or postponed.