Return Planned For Falls Church Students In January

FALLS CHURCH, VA — Falls Church City Public Schools plans to bring back students in groups during January for hybrid instruction.

Superintendent Peter Noonan informed families of the return to school update Tuesday. FCCPS will start with bringing back the smallest group of students and lead up to the largest group. The first group returning on Jan. 5 includes PreK VPI and IEP students, elementary ASOL/Life Skills, K-5 SPED students with 50 percent/greater on IEP, HI/VI/TBI students, targeted ESOL students, secondary ASOL students and secondary therapeutic classroom students. Services would also be provided to medical homebound or home-based students with a home-based model on Jan. 5.

The next group to return will be elementary students on Jan. 12 utilizing the FCCPS Elementary Reopening Plan. The 12th grade class would also return, utilizing the FCCPS Secondary Reopening Plan. The last group to return will be grades 6 to 11 on Jan. 21.

The school district considers three factors with return to school decisions: health data, ability to maintain consistent operations and academics. According to Noonan, FCCPS is experiencing challenges on the operations side. Support personnel who work in maintenance, cleaning and disinfecting of school buildings have been impacted by positive COVID-19 cases and quarantines. Because of that, the school district is returning students in phases based on employee capacity to clean buildings.

The return plan comes after a FCCPS Health Metrics Task Force developed a revised set of metrics and measures regarding school openings and closings. The metrics follow the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions's School Indicators and Thresholds, following Falls Church City CDC K-12 School Metrics data tracked by the Virginia Department of Health. FCCPS will also continue to use the VDH Regional Pandemic Measures for the overall composite for regional trend and burden data. Families can see the FCCPS metrics that would guide decisions to send these students back to virtual-only instruction.

For the CDC core indicators, Falls Church City has 189.5 new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people, which is classified as higher risk for transmission in schools. The percentage of positive tests in the last 14 days is 7.6 percent, which is considered as moderate risk for transmission in schools.

On the regional pandemic measures dashboard, Northern Virginia has a composite score of 19.7 for the week ending on Dec. 26. That is considered a high burden score.

For the first group of students returning on Jan. 5, Noonan asked families to keep students home until Jan. 12 if the family traveled, engaged with large groups of people or celebrated with people outside their households. Families are urged to conduct daily self-monitoring health screenings for their students and not send students to school if they have symptoms, if someone has been exposed in the household or if someone is being tested or has tested positive.