GRANADA — The Granada-Huntley-East Chain School Board on Thursday heard from Superintendent Doug Storbeck, who noted that school will begin one week earlier than anticipated, and he foresees in-person learning as the likely path GHEC will follow.

“Aug. 31 is going to be our first day of school, and we’ll be doing teacher workshops on Aug. 24,” he said. “The reason I felt the need for starting early is, based on my calculations, we would be well below the 10 cases per 10,000 residents in a 14-day span of time, which is the barometer for when we need to go from in-person learning to some type of hybrid scenario.

“Right now, it’s looking good that we’ll be in-person,” he continued. “I learned just today that they want us to make that call two weeks prior to the beginning of school, which is Monday for us. So I will try to get in contact with public health and see if I can make that determination on Monday, so that we can move forward with that plan.

“If people still have questions, those will continue to direct our leadership team,” he said. “We’re purchasing items for our school that will help us implement our safe learning program, such as masks and dividers of various sorts. We still want our teachers to be able to work with our students one on one as much as possible.

“We’re figuring out how to coordinate lunch times and all the schedules throughout the day so that we can minimize cross contact between various grade levels.

The board also heard from Assistant Principal Taylor Topinka via a letter.

“We presented our back-to-school safe learning plan to our staff members on Tuesday, and to our families and students on Wednesday,” Topinka wrote. “We have several documents available to explain our back-to-school procedures on our district website, Facebook page, and distributed through GHEC communication.

“We’re also asking each family with students enrolled at GHEC to complete a survey, gathering information about transportation, meals and interest in our remote-learning option. As we have the finishing touches put on our fall plans for school, our attention returns to the regular topics and planning that take place each fall.”