Taos Municipal Schools to stay remote through March 11
During the Taos Municipal School Board’s virtual meeting Wednesday night (Dec. 9) board members unanimously voted to keep students at home through the third quarter. This decision, influenced in part by a letter from the town of Taos Mayor’s Office, was approved by school board president James Sanborn. He said by keeping students on the remote model through March 11, the coronavirus positivity rates from the holidays will have time to go down.
“If conditions somehow miraculously improved, through testing, vaccines, a miracle, we could always decide to activate some of the hybrid learning models,” Sanborn said during the meeting. “My sense of it right now is Taos Municipal Schools is getting pretty good at delivering remote education.”
Sanborn listed the various projects the facilities management crew is working on at the schools to get the classrooms prepped for students to come back. These include air filtration system installations and sanitizing. While students are learning at home, the schools have ample time to get these added safety measures in place.
“We’ve been able to work on those facilities almost uninterrupted the whole school year because no one is in them,” Sanborn continued. “Anything that we can do to make the school facilities more COVID-safe can still continue.”
Lillian Torrez, superintendent of Taos Municipal Schools, sent a memo to everyone in the district, with a formal email sent to parents. During the meeting, and in the memo, Torrez expressed her appreciation to the board for working on a solution to keep students learning at home for a longer period of time.
“If our New Mexico COVID cases make a significant improvement, the board may elect to start with the face-to-face hybrid model earlier. However, for right now, it is important to plan ahead for our families and teachers/staff,” Torrez said in the memo. “Our goal is to keep all students and staff at the lowest risk possible as we continue to provide remote instruction education for all students.”
Sanborn agreed, and recommended that schools get their hybrid learning models in place and ready to go, just in case conditions change. These hybrid models include other services schools offer such as counselling, coaching for at-risk and struggling students, and special needs services and therapies in small groups.
“Have all that ready to go as soon as we possibly can and be ready to phase it in,” Sanborn said. “I want us to make concrete steps forward as we move back to a more traditional inperson type of learning. And I know we all want to get there.”