As COVID vaccine rollouts now begin to expand to teachers and school staffers, a DeWitt County district is beginning a steering committee with part of its focus to be on strategic planning.

A steering committee in Blue Ridge has begun meeting that is going to focus on issues like professional development and making sure there are strategies in place to work with kids and bring them along educationally in wake of the COVID pandemic altering their development. Schools Superintendent Dr. Hilary Stanifer indicates there will be aspects of this they hoped to accomplish before COVID hit.

As the steering committee progresses, Dr. Stanifer indicates they will engage their community but also their staff and teachers. She compares this process to strategic planning. 

Dr. Stanifer anticipates hearing about how to make up for all the lost classroom time for their students. Administrators anticipate another round of COVID funding coming their way and she believes those funds might be utilized best by getting creative in bridging that development gap.

Dr. Stanifer says the challenge will be to connect with all the students in their district that learned from a different program at home than those that were in-person and also taking into consideration students that didn't have the resources at home to keep up when school was completely shut down in the spring of last year.