School staff member Sylvia Vasquez was doing mandatory health checks on the first day of on-campus instruction at Heliotrope Avenue Elementary, but students kept giving her the wrong answer when she tried to find out if they were healthy.
She would ask how they were feeling, and the answer she kept getting was: “Excited.”
As about 65 students in first grade or younger became the first to receive regular classroom instruction at the Maywood campus in more than a year, students seemed elated — and parents tempered their concerns with a sense of relief as they observed campus safety protocols. Heliotrope was among 61 elementary and 11 early education schools to reopen Tuesday morning, the first of some 1,400 campuses that will reopen by the end of the month in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system.
At Heliotrope, about one in three students were expected to return initially. At some other campuses, the numbers are higher, but district survey data so far shows fewer students are returning to campus if they live in communities with high disease and death rates from COVID-19 — and Maywood was hit hard.
Read the full story at LATimes.com.