Washington authorities said Thursday all schools in the state must provide full-time, in-person education for students for the 2021-22 school year and that students and staff will still be required to wear masks.Read More
WSU's vaccine requirement comes with some major exceptions. Medical and religious exemptions have existed for vaccinations on campus for decades, but this time around, WSU is adding a “personal exemption,” and following that announcement, provided some clarity on exactly what that means.Read More
Without emergency hires, the Moses Lake School District would not have the staffing necessary to comply with the Washington State Department of Health’s reopening guidelines, according to district Superintendent Dr. Joshua Meek. They are essential to the district's reopening, he said.Read More
All public schools in Washington will be required to offer students an in-person learning option starting next month — with school districts having to meet an average of at least 30% weekly in-class instruction by April 19 — under an emergency proclamation Gov. Jay Inslee said he will sign next week.Read More
Grocery store employees and other essential workers in Washington, regardless of age, will be eligible to begin getting the COVID-19 vaccine later this month, followed in April by people who have two or more medical conditions.Read More
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says that following President Joe Biden's direction to states to prioritize vaccinating teachers, preK-12 educators, school staff and licensed childcare workers have been added to the current vaccination tier. Read More
President Biden has said many times that he wants most schools to be open by his 100th day in office, April 30. And on Friday, Feb. 12, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines intended to help schools operate in person safely. But some argue these guidelines will do little to promote school openings.Read More
Plenty of factors have brought Idaho’s larger districts closer to reopening. But none are unique to Idaho. Seventy-six percent of respondents said they wanted to see K-12 students back in the classroom, at least part-time, according to a statewide Boise State University survey released last month. For Republican respondents and parents of K-12 kids, those numbers skewed Read More
Ever since the pandemic closed the nation's schools in March 2020, there has been no official national source for understanding where schools have reopened, how many hours of live instruction students are getting online and just how unequal the access to learning has been over the past 11 months.Read More
News reports and social media feeds have been crowded lately with demands by teachers in Seattle and elsewhere around the state and the country to be vaccinated before they step from behind the computer screen and back into the classroom. Vaccine availability is something not even the governor can guarantee, but teachers are in one of the groups in line for vaccination in Read More
Case numbers have shot up lately in rural America, which skews older and tends to have huge inequality gaps in health care. But there's still resistance in places such as Bruneau, Idaho, which has a population of 500. Here, there's also a pervasive sense in the community that kids need to be physically in classrooms for their education and well-being yet stiff opposition Read More
“There really is relatively small additional risk if you have good safety and health protocols," the governor said Wednesday. "We see it as our task to make sure that when our students go back, when our educators go back that we follow these sound practices of health and safety protocols to keep people safe. When we do that, we now have both that scientific data I’ve just Read More
The governor issued more restrictions on Tuesday, Oct. 20, for higher education campuses. It comes as the University of Washington struggles to contain an outbreak among its fraternities and sororities. There have been outbreaks in Whitman County, home of Washington State University, as well. Whitman County announced three more COVID-19 deaths Tuesday. The county had not Read More
Some Washington counties hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic are now looking toward the possibility of reopening schools for in-person classes. It’s thanks to metrics like hospital bed capacity and the virus incidence rate that continue to improve in Benton, Franklin and Yakima counties.Read More
Washington State University decided in late July that this fall semester would be entirely online. But thousands of students are still in Pullman. President Kirk Schulz says the university is very concerned about the rapid increase in cases.Read More
It was common through the 1800s for American school children to attend a one-room schoolhouse. In 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Swanson family in rural north Olympia will attend a one-garage schoolhouse.Read More
On Monday, Aug. 31, the Moscow-based school reported 24 COVID-19 cases. That’s from over 2,300 recent tests on students and staff. Unlike in nearby Pullman across the border, Moscow has not seen a huge spike in cases. Washington State University is responding to a recent surge – more than 300 cases in Pullman in the past 10 days. Read More
Some schools across the country are under pressure to reopen for in-person classes, even in states like Idaho where coronavirus cases continue to rise out of control.Read More
Idaho Gov. Brad Little says individual school districts will decide whether to bring students back to the classroom this fall. But he says the expectation is that schools will not be closed for an extended period.Read More
Gov. Jay Inslee said Wednesday that schools in the majority of Washington’s counties should strongly consider online-only learning for students this fall due to COVID-19 and canceling or postponing sports and all other in-person extracurricular activities. In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little is urging schools to reopen where it's deemed safe.Read More
Spokane Superintendent Adam Swinyard says parents in his district can choose full-year distance learning or an option that allows for a transition to classroom learning, if that becomes possible later. Both would involve live instruction with teachers. For other districts, like Pullman, there's still an open question about what the fall term will look like, at least in the Read More
