School going smoothly despite pandemic, officials say

Jan 20, 2021

Despite having the highest total number of covid cases in the district, the Old Rochester Regional High School has begun to allow sports and other after school activities. And district officials say the current partial in-person learning model is working well.

“I think that’s an important development for our school community,” ORRHS Principal Michael Devoll said. 

The principal said administrators are starting to get the hang of how to conduct school activities safely during the pandemic. 

But he said ORRHS still has some catching up to do with schools that had the opportunity to host extracurriculars in the fall.

“And we’re getting there,” Devoll said. 

He’s noticed that students and coaches now have a stronger sense of how a positive covid test result can impact a team’s season. 

Alongside expanded extracurricular activities, the high school is now offering Spanish to its remote-only students. 

Devoll said that Spanish wasn’t offered to remote students in the fall due to technological issues with the program used to teach the subject, rather than a lack of sufficient staffing or interest. 

The addition of Spanish for remote students leaves only one AP computer science class as the only class inaccessible to remote-only students.

The principal said that while that particular computer science class is unavailable to remote-only students, there is a different AP computer science course at the school that is available to all students.