Bryson ISD presents COVID-19 closure plan

Bryson ISD Superintendent Greg London presented a preliminary plan for the COVID-19 pandemic closure to the school board Monday, March 16, before finalizing some plans later in the week.

The district will be closed through at least April 3 after Governor Greg Abbott ordered all schools to close due to the outbreak.

“For our 6 through 12 graders, anybody that has access to internet at home and a device, we are working towards doing as much online Google classroom as we can,” London said. “Then we checked out Chromebooks to students that don’t have a device or requested one.”

The superintendent said most of the students should be familiar with Google Classroom. He added the district was still working on solutions for students who do not have internet service. In the mean time, those students will receive hard copies. Students will also receive individualized preference sheets from their teachers with their expectations.

“With Pre-k through 5, those teachers are working through their teacher Facebook pages as far as communication with the parents and students,” London said. “They’re predominantly hard copies, packets that they put together. We will curbside deliver those on Monday and we have a rotation of basically office people and as they pull up we will bring their kids stuff.”

The superintendent added the district will be distributing nutrition through the same curbside manner. He said regular bus routes will run at 10:30 a.m. which will have those students lesson plans and nutrition to drop off.

“We are going to strongly encourage people to receive food services from the school,” London said. “I think it is going to be easy for our bus route kids because we have our ladies who drive those who know where they’re at. They can go deliver, if it is not an internet house they can take assignments to them and pick up.”

London said the hard-copy lessons will need to be returned on Thursday, so the lessons can sit over the weekend before teachers review them.

He said the focus for the first few weeks of lessons will be reviewing the material which has been covered and maintaining the information students have learned. He added he wants to focus on the four core classes.

“As we go into this a couple of weeks, then we start thinking we’ll do we want start tackling a new topic,” London said. “Let’s just take Kim (Hauger), where she teaches a concept, videos herself doing two or three examples and there in Google classroom is the worksheet, go work it and turn it back in.”

The superintendent is encouraging any family who has circumstances makes it hard for the plan to work for them will be worked with if contacted.