FAIRMONT — The Fairmont Area School Board heard from Elementary Principal Michelle Rosen on Tuesday, who highlighted some changes being made to Title I aides for the 2020-2021 school year.

“We’ve been working with our lead title aide and Superintendent Brown that, this year, we’re going to implement Title I aides earlier,” Rosen said. “They’re actually going to start with us on September 10 and they’ll be there all day.

“We’re doing this for a couple of reasons. It’s going to help us build relationships with these people right away. Typically Title I aides don’t start until closer to the end of September. This way they’re here right away so if we would forget to wear masks and don’t keep our numbers low and have to go to distance learning, we’d have relationships already made.

“They will also help with getting kids in and out of the building at the end of the day. Dismissal and arrival will look different, just because we can’t have them all coming in one door. So they’ll be a part of that plan, and also helping our teachers do the education pieces in the classroom.”

Rosen stated that all of the aides will have 170 day contracts for seven hours, utilizing some Covid relief money.

“I’ve talked to them all in the past few days and they’re all very excited for the extension and excited that we’re bringing them in right away.”

Elementary co-principal Andy Traetow also weighed in, stating that school staff has been hard at work providing feedback for all of the planning and possibilities of the new school year.

“We’ve spent the bulk of our summer planning for different scenarios,” he said. We really refined those processes last week to be able to make our finalized learning plan public, hopefully within the next day or so. This week we spent a lot of our time touching base and going over the things we typically do in preparation for a school year. We’re really trying to crunch that into the next three or four days to make sure we’re ready for our staff to come back at the end of this week for professional development.

“We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback,” he continued. “We continue to tell our staff that their feedback and questions help us in our planning, because there’s a lot of things that we’re focusing on with the state and health department guidance in our planning. So their planning helps us refine that, and they’ve done an amazing job.”