Volusia County starts school Monday, will leave tracking COVID-19 cases to county health officials
VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. - Volusia County will officially join the rest of Central Florida on Monday, beginning the school year with both in-person and online options for families.
However, teachers on Sunday began reporting problems accessing the district's Canvas website.
Teachers have been back at work for a few weeks now, preparing for classes to resume.
The Canvas program is used both with the "Volusia Live" and brick-and-mortar learning options.
"Our teachers have been in the classrooms, working very diligently on lesson planning and uploading their lessons and their academic material into this learning platform," said Elizabeth Albert, the president of the teacher's union. "To have it all vanish the day before school starts is like taking the wheels off of your race car and saying, 'OK, the Daytona 500 starts in less than 24 hours. Let's go.'"
Albert added that the school district has since fixed the Canvas issues.
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In Volusia County, about 60 percent of families chose the in-person learning option.
Some teachers are concerned about classroom size. Others are worried because the school district will not be responsible for keeping track of and alerting parents when someone in school gets sick.
The district says it is leaving that to the Volusia County Health Department, telling FOX 35, "We are working closely with the health department. The health department will be keeping track of all cases. We do not keep that data at the school district."
FOX 35 has reached out to the health department to get insight into how it is going to tackle COVID-19 cases, specifically inside schools.
On Monday, a spokeswoman from the Volusia County Health Department sent FOX 35 this statement:
"DOH-Volusia works closely with educational institutions to identify potential cases of COVID-19 and conduct contact tracing and case monitoring of people with potential exposure to a positive COVID-19 case. People with potential exposures will be contacted directly by the Florida Department of Health to notify them of the potential exposure and educate them on the actions to prevent the spread of disease including self-quarantine for 14 days. DOH-Volusia will monitor positive cases and potential cases."
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