Agoura Hills Middle & High Schoolers Will Return March 22

AGOURA HILLS, CA — Just a week and a half after welcoming back fourth and fifth graders to campus, Las Virgenes Unified School District announced that middle and high school students will return to campus on Monday, March 22. This means that all students, except for those who opt to continue virtual learning through the Home Virtual Learning Academy, will be back on campus.

The announcement comes right as Los Angeles County qualifies to enter the less restrictive Red Tier, which permits students in grades 7-12 to return to a modified version of in-person learning.

“We’re excited to bring our middle and high school students back, but of course our focus remains on safety….we know there’s a spectrum of preferences and a spectrum of comfort levels,” Superintendent Dr. Dan Stepenosky said in a Friday webinar. Handling the return of thousands of secondary students safely is a more complicated task than bringing back elementary school students: as Stepenosky pointed out, they move through different teachers and classrooms far more frequently than their younger counterparts.

Students in grades 7-12 will be alphabetically divided into three separate cohorts, per state and county guidelines. Every day, each cohort will spend two blocks in either the morning or the afternoon of live lessons, either virtually or on campus. During the second half of the day, they will learn asynchronously through homework, reading, projects, and more. Students can expect to be back on campus about two times a week, for two and twenty minutes each day. A list of the different schedules of Cohorts A, B, and C can be found on the school’s Return to Campus website.

The district will follow the same safety protocols that it is currently following. According to Stepenosky, the first students returned to campus around 80 days, and 3,600 students are currently back on campus. In that time, there have been no documented COVID-19 transmissions. Students must complete a COVID-19 health screening each day before coming to campus, and must be cleared before they can enter. Thermal scanners will evaluate temperatures as soon as each student enters campus. Students with high temperatures will receive an active screening, and will be sent home with a temperature of higher than 100.4. Students exhibiting COVID-19 will be placed in an isolated area, and asked to return home.

Each student is required to wear masks and remain six feet apart from anyone else, and no parent volunteers are allowed on campus. The whole school will be cleaned in between morning and afternoon sessions, and again at the end of the day using electrostatic cleaners. Air ventilation and HVAC systems also circulate fresh air.

A full list of safety precautions can be found here, while the district’s comprehensive safety plan can be found here.