Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students will be learning online until at least January 15, 2021, the school board decided Thursday evening.

The district’s Board of Education unanimously voted in favor of interim Superintendent Jim Causby’s recommendation to extend virtual classes through the end of the semester.

This is yet another change in the school district’s plan for the semester amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Initially, CHCCS elected for a hybrid in-person/online format for the school year. However, following feedback from the district’s parents and staff members, CHCCS changed course and planned to operate entirely online for the first nine weeks of the semester.

Causby said the district could return to in-person classes earlier if coronavirus trends reverse.

“We [will] review that periodically as we look at the scientific evidence, and at the appropriate time, we can consider adjustments if we need to,” Causby said. “If something happened at the end of the first nine weeks — this all disappears, there’s no more cases — we could reconsider, and we could probably go to Plan A and act like normal.”

At CHCCS’s July 16 meeting, Causby cited the Centers for Disease Control’s recommendation of COVID-19 positive test percentage be no greater than 5 percent in order to reopen schools. Data from North Carolina Health and Human Services shows that the state currently sits at an 8 percent positive rate.

Earlier this month, the Orange County Schools district approved a recommendation from its superintendent to adopt an exclusively remote model of learning for the start of the school year. Dr. Monique Felder recommended four weeks of remote learning over concerns from COVID-19, also citing the goal of returning students to in-person instruction if the county’s coronavirus trends reverse.

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