After transition week, most Fall River Public School students to begin full remote learning

The high amount of COVID-19 cases and quarantines has led the Fall River Public School system to make some changes.

According to School Superintendent Matthew Malone, due to a continuous increase in community spread of COVID-19 the school system will transition to a modified hybrid posture.

“Starting 12/7 we will serve Cohort A “high needs” + Durfee Career & Technical Education shop students in-person & Cohorts B/C/D will be remote”

Courtesy of Fall River Public Schoools

It was a difficult decision for Malone to make.

“Although surely frustrating for many, the transition week will provide parents of cohort C/D students time to make child-care plans for the remote learning day which will continue to be a full-day of learning M-F. This decision was made based on the past 6 weeks of community spread data & our daily accounting of positive employee/student cases + the contact tracing resulting in increased #’s in need of quarantine.”

Students getting any time of in-person learning will be cut more than half.

“This transition will decrease our total in-person from roughly 3500 students per day to roughly 1500 students per day allowing us to shrink our footprint as a mitigation strategy & still serve our high needs students in person.”

For now, this model will last the month of December and then go back to the normal hybrid model on January 4th.

“The decision to pivot to a modified hybrid model was made following extensive discussions with our local Board of Health, Department of Education, school principals, lead nurse, the feedback of our reopening task force, and of course the feedback solicited from members of the School Committee individually. This decision to move to a modified hybrid model will allow us to reduce our in-person footprint for a defined period of time, a direct response to the significant increase in the city’s spread rates.”

Malone stated that he will be making additional announcements concerning January once more data is revealed.