More Muscle Shoals students set to return to in-person classes

Holiday weekend.

I'm dan shaffer.

And i'm najahe sherman.

We're learning how continued fears over the covid spike are influencing parents decisions on how to educate their children.

More students in muscle shoals city schools are returning to in person learning after the holidays .

Waay31's breken terry spoke with the superintendent about the trends the school district is seeing, breken?

Students that go here to muscle shoals will start school on january 7th, five days a week like normal.

The superintendent told me this can all change at the drop of a hat.

That's just one way the pandemic has taken a toll on education.

Holden-we are seeing a lot more failing grades than what were used to seeing and there is a great debate about the standardized testing because there is a school of thought that we need to test this year to get that bench mark.

Muscle shoals superintendent chad holden said students who went virtual struggled more.

Holden- our in-person students quickly caught back up and by the time they ended the fall semester by in large our elementary students were right where they needed to be that were in person.

Our virtual students we are not seeing the type of progress, we'd like to see with them.

Holden believes this factors into the reasons why more muscle shoals parents chose to send their kids back to in person classes for the spring semester.

Holden- when we started the school year, we had about 20% of our students choose the virtual option and were seeing only about 10% choosing the virtual option and were excited about that.

We're ready to have our students back in the class room the virtual option has been a challenge because not every family dynamic lends itself to doing it yourself at home.

Holden said the older students did better with virutal learning but he worries about the long-term effects this will have on elementary age students in the long run.

Live in muscle shoals bt waay31.

Alabama public schools are on winter break now - but the week before classes ended - more than 33-hundred cases were confirmed in schools across the state!

That number was up about a hundred from the week before.

That's according to the alabama department of public health's "covid-19 schools dashboard".

Muscle shoals city schools added 14 new cases that week.

The largest increase in cases in the shoals was at lauderdale county schools.

They added 43 new cases.

We expect an update to that dashboard on january