The first day of new school year begins on Tuesday, August, 17th for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District. Last year, COVID-19 affected in-person learning and Clayton Holland began his tenure as new Superintendent on July 1st.
Holland joined KSRM’s ‘Sound Off’ with host Duane Bannock to layout his priorities for the new school year:
“We’ve really focused coming back to our academics to our education of our students. That is a priority. After last year, I think a lot of, I’m not going to call it a deficit, but there’s a lot of acceleration we need to do with students. We need to get them back to where we were and actually get them further than where they would be. That’s the goal. That piece with the education. Obviously, we have to open and keep schools open safely. That is priority number one. I’ve been telling my staff that this is number one, let’s get this going.”
Holland also went into further detail on COVID-19 mitigation and masking:
“I’m going to start with we have a very layered mitigation plan. We have a lot of things we’re putting in place. the mask piece, is an optional piece. We’re highly recommending it for our staff and students, but it is an option. It’s an option for those families. An option for those students. We have a lot in place that we didn’t have before. I’d like to point out that we have air filtration systems in all our buildings; that high quality Bi-Polar Ionization hospital air quality. In our buildings, we have different cleaning protocols, mechanisms to do that. We are keeping our spacing. We do have a piece where we will follow local health authority mandates. So if a city has a mandate than we’ll follow that mandate. So if a city, let’s say Seward or wherever it may be, implements that, then we’re going to follow that. That means that community is at a level of very concern. We’re going implement that for everyone. Same with our tribal authorities, they also, and some of our villages where they have great concern about access to medical care, we’re going to follow those mandates as well.”
For more information on the KPBSD COVID-19 mitigation plan, click here.
