Kindergarten to grade five students in the Kamloops-Thompson School District could be returning to class as soon as May 25th.

SD73 Board Chair Kathleen Karpuk says that is the earliest kids could start to come back on a part time basis. “We’ll be ready for that date. Right now the provincial government is talking around the 1st of June. We will leave that decision as to when kids are coming back to school up to the provincial government. They will determine that, not the school district.”

She says next week schools will contact parents to start making arrangements. “We think that it’s going to be the teachers that are going to be making contact with the families to find out which families are planning on sending kids to school. We’ll have to be cognizant that some families may want siblings to go on the same days or they may want them to go on different days and that’s a consideration that we’ll have to take.”

Karpuk says once it has an idea of numbers and preferences it will build schedules from there. “Because this is voluntary, we don’t expect that every child is going to be coming back to school. Some families may feel uneasy about sending their kids back to school and they may want to keep them at home. So that’s the second phase of it is training staff and doing some scheduling.”

Karpuk says once the province gives the go ahead it will start resuming in class instruction, but it is up to the government to say when it is safe to send kids back. She says when there is in-class instruction, classrooms won’t go over 50 per cent capacity.