School District 73 is preparing to begin its second week of having students back in the classroom after a fairly successful week one last week.

Assistant Superintendent Trish Smillie says it had pretty good attendance for week one.

“Many families voluntarily decided to come back to school,” she said. “Approximately 3,500 students in elementary school, approximately 1,000 students in secondary school and of those students that intended to attend, about 70 per cent of students attended.”

Smillie expects things will continue to pick up as the month moves along.

“I would anticipate that our attendance would increase over the time, over this month as people become more comfortable with the school system and coming back to restart school this summer,” she added.

Smillie says that 98% of its teachers are also back in the classroom now with the remaining 2% staying home for COVID related reasons.

For the month of June, Tuesday will mark the first school day of the week for students in the district, with Monday reserved for online and remote learning.

“So teachers are at the school and they’re connecting with students in a distance type format, except for those students that are considered priority learners, which means they have requirements that has them at school five days per week,” she added.

“And then from Tuesday to Thursday from K-5 we have up to 50% of students attending voluntarily in class-instruction and they’re divided into two groups.”

She points out that students who were in class last Tuesday saw a little bit of a different setting.

“So when they were outside of the school building they had line up procedures that allowed them to physically distance outside of the school,” Smillie said.

“We had staggered entrances at some of our schools. When they entered the building they had a health screen. So they answered a few questions to make sure they were symptom free and once arriving into the building they immediately went and washed their hands before going to their classrooms.”

Ninety Per Cent of Teachers Returned Across the Province: Education Minister

The Education Minister says almost all B.C. teachers are back in classrooms in some form.

Rob Fleming says only about 10 per cent of teachers are still working off-site, and at home in most of those cases.

“I think what we are seeing province wide is an aggregate number, about 90 per cent of teachers are returning and doing a combination of hybrid model of combining online remote learning and in class instruction,” he added.

Fleming says many teachers at home have been assigned solely to support remote, online learning.

– With files from Colton Davies