BETHLEHEM, Pa. - The school year begins Monday August 30 in the Bethlehem Area School District and Allentown follows the week after.
COVID-19 cases among children have been on the rise since early July, as the delta variant has caused another surge creating a challenge for parents and educators as the new year begins.
Five-year-old Hunter Moore will be in kindergarten at the private Swain School in Salisbury Township. The school will require kids and teachers to wear masks. Her father, Quartez Moore, says he trusts the protocols in place and is eager to get his daughter back in the classroom.
“My biggest thing, you know, this whole year kind of held them back from being able to socialize, to kind of have that be normal for them, so this is a big part of it for us,” Moore said.
It’s the same for Kristina Michener, a 7th-grade literacy teacher in the Allentown School District, who said remote schooling has been taxing on students.
“I think we were asking a lot of kids, I think we were asking a lot of them to learn in a way that they're just not capable of learning, not for anything other than they're just not cognitively able to learn for seven hours a day by themselves without somebody with them,” Michener said, “That's the point of being in school.”
The Allentown School District will also have a universal masking policy in place when the school year begins on September 8.
