Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school system continues normal operations, and school and health officials say they are preparing should that change.
Montgomery County Public Schools Deputy Superintendent Monifa McKnight said plans for remote instruction and hard copy lessons would be ready should schools have to close due to the coronavirus. She was repeating a message delivered in a briefing Tuesday with county officials.
Any decisions about closing an individual school, or all schools across the system, would come from the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, McKnight said.
“At this time, DHHS has said that schools are to remain open,” McKnight said at a news conference Thursday morning.
“They’ve made it clear that there is no reason — from a clinical standpoint — for us to be alarmed, and we want to continue to stress that message to our parents and to our community,” McKnight added.
County Health Officer Dr. Travis Gayles, who would be the person to make the call on school closures, was asked what would trigger that decision.
Gayles told reporters, “There’s no hard and fast criteria, in terms of being able to say if five cases happen, this is what we would do. I would just emphasize that we would look at all of those factors of information to make a decision that’s also in concert with our state officials.”
Schools Superintendent Jack Smith said he’s constantly getting updates on the response to the coronavirus. Smith leads Maryland’s largest school system, with 208 school buildings and more than 165,000 students.
“It’s the last thing I think about at night before I fall asleep, and it’s the first thing I look at in the morning when I get up,” Smith said. His day started, he said, with a check for updates at 5:30 a.m.
Nearly one-third of the school system’s students qualify for free and reduced meals, and because so many families depend on school-provided meals for their children, McKnight said the school system will work on plans to provide food distribution sites should schools have to close.
WTOP’s Kate Ryan reported from Rockville, Maryland.
