Schools across Spartanburg County are busy preparing for the return of students Monday. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, which sent students home in March through the end of the 2019-20 school year, continue to make for an uncertain start for 2020-21. District return plans began to take shape and were approved in July. 

Here's a list:Return plans, hybrid model breakdowns for Spartanburg County schools

At Carver Middle School, seventh-grade social studies teacher DeShawn Nesbitt and her colleagues were prepping their classrooms for a much smaller first day than usual. 

Nesbitt’s homeroom class will have 11 students this year, split into two groups on the District 7's hybrid A/B schedule. The desks in her classroom were set in pairs, one desk for Day A and one for Day B, with enough space between each pair to allow students to be seated six feet apart, she said.

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On the first day, she expects to welcome five or six students and is excited to do so.

“Of course, in the beginning, I was somewhat nervous, but the district has put so many procedures in place to make sure the students are safe, as well as the teachers. So I feel confident that we’re all ready,” Nesbitt said.

Along with socially distanced classrooms, these procedures include: requiring students and teachers to wear masks and making sure each student has their own supplies and is not sharing with other students. Teachers are also required to wear face shields when interacting with students one-on-one. Additionally, each classroom will be stocked with hand sanitizer, alcohol wipes, and disinfectant spray so desks can be cleaned between classes. 

To keep the school looking normal for students, Carver Middle School intentionally limited the number of spacing stickers and COVID-19 instructional visuals throughout the building. Carver is keeping as many of the desks as possible in the classrooms, even though not all will be used. However, other schools may remove desks, use three-sided desk dividers for students seated at large tables, and implement more instructional safety visuals, as needed.

Spaced desks, instructional posters, spacing stickers, and additional hand-sanitizing stations have been implemented at schools throughout the county. 

Nesbitt said she was planning socially distanced versions of her usual icebreaker games at the beginning of the school year. 

“Everything is different, but we’re making the best of it. I mean for right now, this is our new normal, so we have to make the best of it,” Nesbitt said. 

Carver Middle School Principal Nicole Thompson noted that there were some changes made throughout the school, including taping off the hallway water fountains. Students have been asked to bring their own water bottles to school. Carver students will only be using digital textbooks which they can access on their school-issued laptops. 

Students will also have their temperatures checked before entering the building and will be sent home if they are running a fever of 100 degrees or more. 

“We’ve had to equip our art classes with extra material so that the students won’t share. They’ll have their own little packets of crayons and markers. (The students) will probably notice teachers wearing gloves (and) lots of handwashing. They will also have to get used to not eating in the cafeteria or congregating in areas like the gym,” Thompson said. 

She estimated that about 150 students would be in the building at a time since 380 students had opted for the district's virtual school. 

District 7 Chief Communications Officer Beth Lancaster said many of these procedures were being implemented district-wide. Many also align with the procedures outlined in Spartanburg County's six other districts’ plans. 

Schools throughout the district have also stepped up their cleaning procedures. In addition to the regular wiping down of desks and other high-touch surfaces, each school is equipped with an electrostatic fogger, a handheld machine that sprays a mist of disinfectant, which a member of the school’s cleaning staff will use to clean each room at the end of the day. 

“What this allows us to do is clean all of the surfaces beyond what we might normally be able to wipe down manually,” Lancaster said. 

District 7 has also invested in new technology. The district is providing webcams for every classroom to allow teachers to better present materials to students on their distance learning and e-learning days. 

“It’s a high-def webcam with a built-in microphone. The teacher can share exactly what she’s doing on her (Promethean smart board) panel in the chat session while the students are seeing him or her on the camera," said Eric Levitt, the district’s chief operations and technology officer. "The students are seeing (the teacher’s) screen in the (live stream) window and at the same time because of the webcam they’re also seeing (the teacher) teach in a little square next to the screen."

District 7 - like all other Spartanburg school districts - has adopted a Hybrid A/B schedule where only half of each school's student body will attend in-person each day. On distance learning days, District 7 chief academic officer Terry Pruitt said, students in his district will work on assignments their teachers give them. 

 "Our goal is to engage every student, every day, especially on a hybrid schedule. The teacher could even set up some work that she could even monitor and pull them into teams if she has time to do that," Pruitt said. "There will be occasions because of us having webcams in our classrooms that (a teacher) might have their B Day students sitting in front of them and pull in their A Day students virtually." 

All Spartanburg County students in the Hybrid programs will participate in e-learning days on either Wednesday or Friday. In District 7, these days are envisioned as flexible intervention days.

"On Friday e-learning day, we can provide some small group, targeted instruction. Maybe we've taught some concepts and identified students that we need to work with or maybe we've got some students we need to accelerate," Pruitt said. "(A teacher) might pull their whole class in for an hour-and-a-half and take a virtual field trip to the Smithsonian. Those days I think could be very enriching in terms of enhancing our curriculum." 

District 7 bought 1,100 new iPads to equip each kindergarten and first-grade student, so they can complete their work at home. State funding, provided to all districts, also allowed them to purchase WiFi hotspots for 500 families in their district who did not have and could not purchase home internet service. 

“It would definitely be over 1,000 students who now have WiFi," Levitt said. 

While parents won’t have as many opportunities to visit their children, officials still want them to feel comfortable and to know the school is accessible. Parents can still participate in socially distanced parent-teacher meetings, Levitt said and can go to the school’s office wearing a mask. 

At Carver, community liaison CeeJ Jefferson is also providing a video tour of the school and its new safety features on the school’s website. The tour includes a look inside the classrooms.

For her part, Thompson was confident in her staff’s ability to protect themselves and their students and provide a positive learning environment during the pandemic whether they are voluntarily teaching online or in the classroom.  

"We have a lot that we can complain about that we can’t do anything about," Thompson said. "So we need to get our mind out of the negativity and start looking at things in a different light.”

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Schools will be following detailed guidelines from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to determine what to do when symptoms or cases emerge. Breakdowns of these guidelines are included in the districts’ return plans and include information on when and how long students and staff need to quarantine when exposed to, showing symptoms of, or testing positive for COVID-19. 

Parents Ask: What will happen if my child has to quarantine once school starts?

Students and staff will be expected to wear masks in hallways and common areas, on buses, and when they have to interact with anyone closely. They will be provided with a mask if they do not have one, but are encouraged to bring their own.

“We will have plenty of face coverings and hand sanitizer on hand for all students and staff, but parents can provide their own if they wish,” District Two spokesman Adrian Acosta said. 

Levitt said District 7 ordered 32,000 masks, 2,000 two-liter bottles of hand sanitizer, 2,000 cases of cleaning wipes to distribute among the 650 classrooms, and various offices and facilities in the district. 

School and bus cleanings will also happen more frequently. For students attending school in-person, social distancing will be enforced in the classrooms and on buses as much as possible and masks will be worn when it is not possible. 

DHEC is allowing school buses to fill up to only 67 percent capacity, which was increased from the 50 percent capacity set in July. 

Everyone on the buses will be required to wear a mask, buses will load from the back, the buses will be sanitized a minimum of twice per day and high-touch surfaces will be wiped down more often. These safety protocols are standard across the county's school districts. 

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Additionally, all districts are being provided with electrostatic sprayers by the state, which sprays a mist or fog of disinfectant and can be used to more thoroughly and quickly clean buses and other large spaces. 

When students arrive at any school, they will have their temperature checked and be sent home or isolated if they have a fever. 

Physical Education teachers are faced with a new world of social distancing and a limit on the facilities and equipment they can use under COVID-19 restrictions, Many of them are also coaches, and have adapted to some of the same measures due to South Carolina High School League constraints on workouts and practices.

Todd Seagle, who coaches both tennis teams at Spartanburg High School and who is a P.E. teacher at Pine Street Elementary, described a little bit of the new world P.E. teachers will face.

"We're either going to be going into individual classrooms, or outside," Seagle said. "We're not using the gym, and we're being asked to use very limited equipment that can be easily sanitized. We're trying to stay away from porous materials. For example, we're not using things like cloth beanbags, but would go toward things like a hard paddle and a whiffle ball, maybe."

District 7's P.E. teachers have also come up with a unique plan for the district's A/B schedule. They're filming and uploading a bank of P.E. lessons featuring teachers from the district.

"I might teach a lesson with other teachers participating in the lesson,"  Seagle explained. "With the split schedule, if you're in the A group on Monday and Wednesday and you're scheduled for P.E. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you would never see us. This is a way for those kids, and our virtual kids, to see a familiar face."

At Dawkins Middle School in District 6, P.E. teacher and athletic director Jo-Jo Hawkins sees many of those same challenges.

"Activities in a group setting won't be the go-to," he said. "There will be a lot more individual instruction."

Something as simple as dressing out for gym class has had to be reconsidered in the wake of the pandemic.

"We're not using the locker rooms as of right now," he said. "For the safety of the kids, that's a more confined space, and it's just not the best idea right now. We want them in clothes they can be athletically active in, but we're keeping them out of the locker rooms at this time."

Hawkins said the split schedule and virtual learning presents its own set of challenges, but that District 6 is handling those things well.

"Our Google classroom has been awesome, and we have that set up along the lines of the things we're doing in class," he said. "For our schedule right now, if you have P.E. this semester, you're in class both days you come to school. The Google classroom and virtual instruction will help keep them physically active at home as well, which is the  biggest thing we're emphasizing."

Both teachers are looking forward to getting started, even with the uncertainties of a new approach.

"It's just getting back to some type of normalcy," Seagle said. "Seeing the kids, and having a routine every day. I thrive on a routine."

Hawkins is excited to see his fellow teachers and his students for the first time since mid-March.

"For me, this is the first time I'll see some of them since the pandemic started," he said. "One of the reasons I got into this profession was to build relationships with the kids and with my colleagues. This will be a chance to get back into something that's different, but somewhat familiar."