POSTED ON APRIL 23, 2020 BY KIMBERLY JENKINS

Minford prepares for the rest of the school year

MINFORD — Schools may not be in session. Still, Scioto County and other school superintendents are as busy as ever, due to the continual changes in the Coronavirus updates from Governor Mike DeWine.

Jeremy Litteral, Superintendent of Minford Local Schools, took time out of his busy day, to talk about the closing of schools for the rest of this school year.

”Our teachers are coming back in the buildings next week, they are on a staggered schedule, just like a grade level a day, in each building, working on the next round of instruction. Remote instruction is going to continue the rest of the year, so we’re going to do that through the three weeks in May and get that delivered to kids next week,” Litteral said.

Litteral shared they are working on a plan on how they are going to get things that belong to the students out of the buildings. He said they are still working on that, but that they will announce times each grade level will be able to pick things up, and the teachers will probably bag things up for the younger grades and then they upper grades, they will probably let them get in their lockers.

Litteral said that with the prom and graduation tentatively set, that are the main focuses they have for now. He said, “We’re just trying to make sure we continue the learning, and our food programs are going to continue through the three weeks in May until we are scheduled for school, Monday, May 18th will be our last delivery day for food, we do our food program every Monday and are serving about 150 right now.”

He said that they are hoping to have some kind of summer food program as they don’t know exactly what will be available with budget cuts etc. and they are not sure what that will be right now. He said that they right now have about half of the food delivered by volunteers from bus drivers to teachers and then half is picked up and that the folks out there have been very appreciative.

Litteral said that they are working on Kindergarten registration right now, “We have an online form that we put in place last year that automatically integrated with Progress Book and the parents can go in and complete all of their forms that way, we’re thinking we will roll that out, actually, it is already on the website. They will do all the forms that they usually do in person online this year and that we can get an idea of who the kids are that will be coming in and as of right now, the forms are finalized.” https://forms.gle/Q8c4poT9Q2Xha29a9 or the Minford website. He also said that open enrollment is going on right now and they had mailed out their letters and the forms are posted online, these also can be found on the school website by typing open enrollment in their search engine.

Litteral added that through all this, “Overall I feel like our crew has done a really good job of this, I’m proud of my teachers and everybody who’s pulled this off because it’s something we never thought we’d have to do. At this point, we’re going to try to focus on how we are going to collect everything from the kids, textbooks and things like that and how we’re going to get their things to them, we still have art projects and things that we want to get in their possession.” He said that there were a lot of things out there about how to get some kind of closure to see the kids and at least wave or something and that they are working on that idea.

Litteral talked about athletics and said that Mrs. Ruby, Mr. Pica and Danielle Ashley are working on a project to create some type of collage photo of the athletes on the teams for each kid on the team, so they can remember their teams since so many seniors missed out on that. Minford has set up a tentative date for a virtual graduation ceremony and then plans for hopefully a true graduation and prom. (This information can be found on the Minford School Website.

Litteral concluded with a comment about how disappointing the closure of school for this year, “The hardest part here is that they don’t get to experience so many things that everybody else did during this time, we’re trying our best to come up with these plans, I’m proud of our graduation committee’s plan of what they came up with on the virtual graduation ceremony, but I know it doesn’t equate of what the experience is to actually go through the full graduation, all the spectators and all the pomp and circumstance that you’re used to on that. We’re hoping that in July we can have that, but at least we just wanted to have something that on the normal traditional graduation day the kids could have to remember that. That’s going to make it a little better, I hope, but I know they are still missing out on a lot of the things and I hate that for them, but unfortunately there is nothing else that we could do at this point.”

In the upcoming weeks, the Portsmouth Daily Times plans on talking to all of the Superintendents about their plans for the rest of this school year. It is a shame that the senior class of 2020 has had to endure this kind of school year and at Minford, it looks like they are trying their best to do everything they can for their students as others in the county will be doing also.