The Aransas Pass School District has been working hard to find ways to address the issues surrounding distance learning ever since its school campus closed in mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present a challenge for the district on how it will continue to provide academic distance learning in the new school year.
“Normally, if you have a distance learning platform, you would spend months, if not a year, preparing for such a thing. But we prepared for it in one week,” said Aransas Pass ISD Superintendent Cara Cooke.
Now the school district has received approval to purchase 1,500 more Chromebooks so students can transition into a blended learning climate.
“That when school starts this year for the 20-21 school year, that we basically become a one-to-one district where students will have devices that they would have at home. They would do learning here at the campus, and we would flip the classroom in certain areas,” said Cooke.
The Board of Education approved the school district’s $300,000 request earlier this month. The money will come from the 2017 school bond election.
“We knew that we have got to have devices, enough devices that every child in our district, if they do not have one accessible at home, that we wanted to be able to provide that for them in a check-out process through the district,” said Cooke.
The Aransas Pass School District will meet on Monday to discuss the reopening of its schools. The plan is to bring students back on August the 10, instead of August 24 as they originally planned.