It’ll be back to business as usual for Tamaqua Area School District staff and students.

At least as of now, that’s the plan for the upcoming 2021-22 school year, which begins next month.

At Tuesday night’s workshop meeting, the school board’s education committee approved the 2021-22 health and safety plan, which will be put to vote at next week’s board meeting.

“This plan brings us into what I would consider a fairly normal beginning of the school year,” said Ray Kinder, superintendent.

“There are some things that will need to be worked out and some things that are being worked on as we speak.”

TASD students will be expected to attend in-person education. There won’t be an extensive online option as there was during the pandemic.

“We will have a virtual academy that we’ve always had - we’ve had that for the last 10 years. Students will still be able to enroll into that program, but it’s a small minority of students that are in there. We anticipate, and surveys tell us, that students want to and plan to come back,” Kinder added.

Tamaqua was one of the few school districts in the region to keep its doors open for in-person learning during the pandemic.

While there are still COVID-type precautionary procedures in place, there aren’t any scheduled dates to deep clean any of the buildings, which had students do remote learning on those days during the 2020-21 school year.

“We believe that in-class instruction is the best method to educate our kids,” said Kinder. “Unless circumstances change, we won’t plan to have those types of days, but we will have the ability to do so. In an ideal situation, we would be in school 180 of 180 days.”

Once Tamaqua’s health and safety plan is submitted to the state and finalized, all of the information will be available to the public.

Masks or not?

As of now, the only scenario during the school day when masks are mandatory for Tamaqua students are when they’re on the school bus. Kinder noted that the mask requirement on the bus is a federal public transportation law.

Last school year, students carried around Plexiglas dividing shields with them to each class for their desks. As of now, they won’t have to worry about that for the 2021-22 school year.

“We’re not anticipating those types of things at this time. At this point, we’re looking at maintaining some traffic patterns and what not, but as I said, it will look like a normal school year next year,” added Kinder.

“The buses are something we’ll more closely examine. I’m anticipating that there will be clarification, and more clarification over the next couple of weeks until school starts.”