GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – As Green Bay students prepare to head back for in-person classes next week, they’ll notice a few differences from this time last year.
Masking, distancing, and more hand sanitizer than most people could fathom will be utilized across the Green Bay Area Public School District as students return to class.
“They will see signage reminding them to to do the social distancing. So whether that’s being lined up in the hallways or within the classroom itself maintaining that distance,” said Public Relations Director Lori Blakeslee. “It’ll also be a little different in that they’ll have to maybe enter a different door than they had last year, just because there are some differences in how students will enter and exit the building.”
But most things students are used to seeing at school will generally look familiar.
“Most students will be eating in their school cafeteria. It will be social distanced, but that should feel relatively the same,” Blakeslee said. “They’ll continue to have the same things that that have last year, such as music and arts and physical education. So all of those opportunities will still be available. Kids will still be going out for recess.”
Blakeslee also believes that active student pushback on the new rules will be minimal.
“I think that our first approach to this, obviously, is just teaching the reasons for why,” Blakeslee told WTAQ News. “For our littles, they already have songs about why you wear a mask and they’ll watch videos about why to wear a mask. A lot of it is just going to be the teaching to explain the reason why. And from what we’ve heard from other school districts, wearing a face covering really has not been an issue.”
The district is prepared with PPE, including 400 gallons of hand sanitizer, 123,000 thousand cloth face coverings, 411,000 disposable face coverings, and 1.5 million disposable sanitizing wipes.
“It wasn’t that we weren’t ready for kids to come back. We have purchased all that stuff. We’ve distributed it in the schools, it’s sitting in the warehouse, so it’s all ready to go and refresh when we need more,” Blakeslee explained. “One parent wrote ‘Holy Cow!’ because, I think, just to get your mind around what that looks like is pretty incredible…it is a pretty herculean task to be able to procure as much stuff as needed for 20,000 student body school district.”
Students are set to begin the return to in-person classes on Monday.
