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At Wednesdays’ school board meeting, Chambers County School District Superintendent Dr. Kelli Hodge updated the district’s COVD-19 numbers.

Since the start of the school year on Aug. 12, there have been 10 total cases of COVID-19 in the student population, while there have been eight total cases since staff reported back to work on Aug. 4.

With the end of the first nine weeks of the school year quickly approaching, families of online students can decide to either keep their students in traditional school, move them to online or send them back to traditional school from the online option.

“We have actually let people come back [to traditional learning] during these weeks because it’s really better for them to be at school,” Hodge said. “We have not allowed anyone to leave from traditional to virtual in the middle of the nine weeks.”

With the deadline to either pull a student out of traditional school or send them back to traditional school quickly approaching, CCSD has sent out a survey to parents to see if students will be returning to campus or remaining at home.

“It’s just so we can get an idea of how many plan to continue in the virtual setting for the second nine weeks and how many plan to return to school,” Hodge said.

CCSD started the school year with about 930 students participating in virtual school. There have been about 550 responses to the survey in less than a week. Of the 550 responses, 243 students will be returning to traditional schooling. Sixty-three students have already come back to on-campus learning in the first six weeks of school.

“What that means is we will have less than 20 percent of our kids participating in the online program, and we felt that would happen,” Hodge said.

Along with finding out which students would return to campus, the survey is there to help the principals of those schools to figure out how to bring an influx of students back on campus.

“What I have told the principals to do is to look at their sheet [their number of students returning] and decide how that was going to work best for them and their school,” Hodge said. “I’ve told them to already start communicating with these parents so everything is ready to go on that first day of the second nine weeks. Having these three weeks to plan and communicate, I think that is going to be helpful.”