by Gabriella Krengel | staff writer

NEISD will now offer virtual conferencing and tutoring for students who need to remain off-campus.

“Last year with COVID  what we found is that students struggled, even if we gave the option for hybrid,” Assistant Principal Sara Moseley said. “So we wanna make sure that if students are out for quarantine that we have remote conferencing set up for those students.”

The remote conferencing will only be available to students who are quarantining.

“So in Skyward when you turn in your note to the clinic and it says, out for 10 days because of quarantine, that triggers a code that we put into the system so that teachers and everyone knows that this is why they’re out,” Moseley said.

Students and parents will be sent emails about the conferencing after they are marked out for quarantine. This will be coordinated by the school nurse.

“There are also new rules about attendance, we don’t wanna penalize students because they have to be out just like teachers and how they sometimes have to be out, it just makes it hard on everyone,” Moseley said.

The administration says they will continue to work on a way to support students.

“If a student goes to the tutoring then they get marked, the district would then, after the fact check the attendance and then they would make it perhaps a present or maybe give it a different code because you attended remotely,” Moseley said.

Science Teacher Elisa Compton believes there are many benefits.

“I think it’s a really good idea because when students are out for a long time it’s hard to just learn things from just notes posted on google classroom,” Compton said, “and they’ll have someone there able to ask questions to and get an answer immediately instead of having to wait for me to email them back.”