Some parents concerned over Winona School District in-person learning

WINONA, Miss. (WCBI) – Since October 12th, the Winona-Montgomery Consolidated School District has switched to in-person learning.

The reason?

“Neither students, nor parents nor teachers are prepared to be virtual learners,” says School District Superintendent Teresa Jackson. “Not 12th graders, not ninth graders and certainly not fifth graders and first graders.”

For the first nine weeks of the semester, the school district offered both hybrid and virtual classes due to the pandemic. Jackson says they do not have the resources to make virtual learning widely available.

“When we asked the question to our community, early on in this, about 30 percent of our students do not have access to reliable internet in their homes,” she says.

Jackson also says that virtual learning has not been as effective at the elementary school level.

“Teachers were creating Google Classrooms where they were putting content in those classrooms that, honestly many of our students and parents were not accessing or were not accessing well,” she says.

Currently, the school district is offering in-person learning for grades K through 12 and an option for virtual learning for students grades seven through 12. Students with pre-existing conditions can use virtual learning as well but must get a note from their doctor. That same option does not extend to family members with pre-existing conditions.

Chastity Turner is a mother of three students, two in the elementary school, one at the secondary school.

“My biggest concern is that my children are going to go to school and bring something back home to my grandmother,” Turner says. “I’m the caregiver for my grandmother. She’s 86.”

Jennifer Phillips has pulled her 9-year-old son out of the elementary school because of her elderly father and her mother, who has Type 2 diabetes.

“I wanted to do at home learning because that would be the best for my child’s health and also my parents health because that’s where he stays when I’m at work,” Phillips says.

Both Turner and Phillips say they would just like the option to go back to virtual learning.

“It’s the middle of the school year. I don’t have the curriculum for [home-schooling],” says Turner. “I’m not a teacher, I’m a parent. We were working well with the procedures we had in place.”

The week after opening back to in-person learning, 104 students across the district had to be quarantined. However, that number dropped to just three the week after that.