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Leaders, educators and families are working together to strengthen the home-school connection during coronavirus school closures

On Friday, March 13, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and I held a press conference to address whether schools should stay open in the face of COVID-19. We shared a four-level decision tree for each of our 173 school districts to use when making their choice.

Over the following weekend, several cases were confirmed in Minnesota, a neighboring state. The majority of our larger school districts are located directly on the Minnesota border, so having confirmed cases so close to home impacted how we made certain decisions. We also considered that there are 750,000 citizens in North Dakota and only 100 tests had been administered. Were we really getting a true picture of where North Dakota stood when it came to the virus?

On Sunday, March 15, the governor and I met with our COVID-19 Unified Command Team, led by the National Guard and the Department of Health. The governor gave the order to close all schools from Monday, March 16 to Friday, March 20 for additional planning. Each superintendent was given the authority to decide which staff members were essential, and those people reported to work on March 16 and 17 to develop plans to continue learning and provide school meals.

On Thursday, March 19, based on the number of tests administered, the number of community spread confirmations, and the number of confirmations in general, the governor extended the executive order to close all public and nonpublic school buildings to students until further notice. The governor tasked all school districts to develop age-appropriate plans for full continuation of learning and submit them to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) by March 27.

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