The East Hampton School District will restrict classes to remote-only at the John M. Marshall Elementary School starting Friday, and will extend this week’s virtual instruction at the middle and high schools through next week.
Richard Burns, the superintendent, said the district is planning a return to in-person learning at each campus on Monday, Jan. 25.
“Unfortunately, at this time our schools are continuing to see a dramatic uptick in the number of positive Covid-19 cases among our students and staff,” Mr. Burns said in an email. “Contact tracing procedures are ongoing and in place for each positive Covid-19 case. . . . This uptick has resulted in an increased number of quarantined staff and students.”
Just before Mr. Burns’s announcement, Karen Kuneth, the interim principal at John Marshall Elementary, said in an email to parents that there are new cases of the virus in students at the first and second grade levels. Two entire classrooms, one first grade and one second grade, are to be quarantined. Additionally, she said, there is a kindergarten teacher who tested positive, but had not been at school recently, so no quarantines are needed in that case.
Ms. Kuneth said the teachers and staff “are prepared to seamlessly transition to remote learning.”
East Hampton as a district crossed the 100-case mark this week. As of Tuesday, the most recent data that was available on the state’s Covid-19 database by Wednesday afternoon, there had been 54 cases of the virus at the high school, 14 at the middle school, and 34 at the elementary school, for a total of 102 positive tests since the start of school in September.