Governor Jim Justice says schools statewide will reopen in January, regardless of COVID-19 spread

My Buckhannon
December 30, 2020

The school map experiment is over.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jim Justice said he would open all elementary and middle schools across West Virginia for five days per week regardless of the number of COVID-19 cases in each county.

Unveiled in August and tweaked more than a dozen times, the weekly map published by the West Virginia Department of Education was designed to indicate by colors where schools were safe to open, and where they had to remain closed.

But with the surge of cases since school began on Sept. 8, the map now shows just a single county — Calhoun — as safe to reopen.

So Justice announced Wednesday that the map will no longer be used at all for elementary and middle schools, which will reopen statewide on January 19. High schools will continue to follow the map, although Justice said more tweaks will be made to loosen the restrictions on in-person school, including allowing orange counties to open.

Sports will not start until at least March 1, Justice said.

“We have got to get our kids back in school,” Justice said. “We tried, really, really hard, but we all know that we are failing [in virtual learning].”

Since schools first opened in West Virginia on Sept. 8, more than 1,000 West Virginians have died from COVID-19 and the rate of spread has increased exponentially, going from about 150 cases per day to more than 1,000 per day.

The Mountain State currently has the second-highest rate of spread nationally, Justice said. But he said the spread in schools was 0.2% among students and 0.3% among staff.

“We have got to keep the social distancing going and all that,” Justice said.

The governor added that local school boards will still have full control to close schools, as many counties did when cases surged in December.

Updates per WVDE:

In-person school is five-days per week, not blended.
High schools will be open unless the county is red.
The weekly map will no longer be published, high schools will use the daily map.
Families can still elect for virtual learning.
Remote learning will be used Jan. 4-15.