SANDY, Utah — Corner Canyon High School will be exclusively online for two weeks beginning Monday.
The Canyons School Board re-examined the COVID-19 reopening plan amid a second surge of the virus hitting high schools particularly hard.
On Tuesday, the board will consider taking similar action at Brighton, Alta and Draper Park schools.
“We are just heartbroken,” teacher Julie Beane said outside the school board meeting Friday night.
Corner Canyon High School teacher Charri Jenson is in the ICU on a ventilator after getting COVID-19 last week.
"She is our mama. It will be wonderful when she gets out of the hospital,” said Beane.
More than 600 students at Corner Canyon are quarantined. Before Friday night, the school was on a split schedule, which went against the district’s reopening plan.
“They need to follow the guidelines stated or change the guidelines,” Beane said.
District board members no longer feel the threshold of 15 cases required to close a school is a strict rule, but rather a suggestion.
“We are learning things about COVID-19 and schools that we simply didn’t know four months ago,” said district spokesman Jeff Haney.
In the new plan, when one percent of a student body is COVID positive, the board will meet with health experts to decide the next step, rather than an automatic switch to online learning.
“This is our way of being clear about how we will move forward and what would trigger possible future precautionary measures,” said Haney.
The board said case counts are nearing one percent for at least three other schools in the district.
