The end of spring break does not mean school will be starting up right away in Washoe County. The district has a plan to get students back to learning.
Staff over at the Washoe County School District's (WCSD) print shop is getting to the task of printing thousands of what the school district is calling 'distance learning packets.' This is an effort to continue the learning process, even when school isn't in session.
"The packets are important because some of our families may not have access right now to a laptop or device at home or internet. So we need to make sure that what we are providing electronically for students, we are providing in hard copy packet form as well," said Debra Biersdorff, Chief Academic Officer for the Washoe County School District.
These packets include everything from math to social studies, but won’t bring any new lessons that students haven't learned yet. The packets are specifically geared for different education levels, and are an entirely optional learning opportunity.
"We think that our families will appreciate the materials, our teachers will appreciate the materials once they see them. So, we had to start printing first, because that's going to take a lot of time," said Biersdorff.
Exactly how much time is still to be seen, as just the high school packets are estimated to take up over a million pages, front and back.
"For our high school packets, they are pretty big packets, so it's going to take about 80 hours on two machines just to run half of the packets," said Joann Capurro, Print Shop Supervisor for WCSD.
The school district is also instructing teachers to make calls to parents.
"Our teachers, under the leadership of each of our principles, are going to be setting up a schedule of call lists where they will be reaching out to all of our families to check in," said Biersdorff.
As for getting the packets out, these printers will have to remain running for days at a time in order to make the deadline for distance learning.
The first official day of distance learning starts next Wednesday, April 1st.
They are still finalizing the delivery schedules, working with the transportation department on getting 60 buses to deliver across the community. They expect to make the first deliveries of packets by this Friday.
