Riverview Charter quarantines an entire grade level for teacher’s COVID-19 exposure
Parents at Port Royal’s Riverview Charter School were told Saturday that the entire sixth grade had to quarantine after a teacher tested positive for COVID-19.
Approximately 60 of the school’s 82 sixth graders are going to the school four days a week for full-time, in-person classes, while the rest have remained in online-only remote learning.
The in-person students will be quarantined until Dec. 3, according to an email from the school’s interim director Sarah Cox.
“All sixth grade students rotate through all four classrooms and therefore may have been exposed,” Cox wrote Saturday. “We are so terribly sorry for any inconvenience this causes your family.”
Sixth-grade students can join their virtual classmates in online learning “as long as they are well and physically able to” during the quarantine period, according to Cox.
The school switched to the four-days-a-week model on Oct. 26, one week after longtime director Alison Thomas abruptly announced she would resign on Nov. 1.
Thomas had reportedly clashed with the school’s board of directors on its reopening decision. She was replaced by interim director Cox, a fifth-grade teacher at the school.
While Riverview, a public charter school, is a part of Beaufort County School District, it has a separate board of directors and is mostly independent from district decisions on course offerings, reopening plans and similar operational decisions. It was the first school in the district to move away from a hybrid instructional model in favor of full-time, in-person classes.
District superintendent Frank Rodriguez announced Nov. 13 that the rest of the district would follow suit after winter break, offering five-days-a-week, in-person classes starting Jan. 4.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the date that Riverview students returned to full-day in-person instruction. The article has been updated.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 10:14 AM.