Northern Lehigh School District will remain in the hybrid schedule while it reviews data from surveys.

Superintendent Matthew J. Link said Monday, “Recently we had surveyed the community, actually the parents and guardians of our students, as well as all of our employees about some of their thoughts as we kind of move into the spring semester,” Link said.

With regard to the parent/guardian survey, Link said at the school board meeting that the district received 706 responses, which is a little less than 50% of the student enrollment within the district. On the employee side, Link said the district received 198 responses, and has about 240 or so employees within the district.

“So this week, the administrative team will start to kind of data mine all of those responses, and really what we’re looking for is to be able to run some projections on, one, if at some point we are able to start bringing more children back into the district more frequently, what may social distancing look like on the buses, within the classrooms, within the cafeterias, and then be able to share that information out again to parents and just say, ‘OK this is what it actually looks like now that we have some numbers, are you still of the same mindset,’ but then also to have some conversations with our employees about if this were to occur, kind of what would your expectations be through a safety and education lens.

“So right now, we’re simply at the point of we’re going to start reviewing the data that we have received.”

Link noted other things the district continues to monitor.

“This week something new started where the Department of Health, through the Department of Education, is going to start sharing out weekly updates on the vaccine,” he said. “As we all know, there’s an extremely high demand for the vaccine, but the supply is simply not meeting the demand at this time, certainly not locally, not across the state or my understanding is across the nation.

“So, we’re hopeful that there’s some progress made there to be able to have in particular our employees vaccinated as quickly as possible if they choose to participate. We can continue to work with St. Luke’s University Health Network, Lehigh Valley Health Network, and most recently we’ve been in communication with Bechtel’s Pharmacy here in Slatington about some ways to get the vaccine to education workers which are in group 1B as efficiently as possible, so hopefully these weekly updates coming down from the Department of Education and the Department of Health will help guide us in guiding our employees.”

Director Gale Husack asked Link when he will be able to share some of those survey results.

“It will be shared down the road, because we haven’t had an opportunity to look at it together as an administrative team,” he said. “But what I would say is the next natural time to share that out would be probably at the March policy and education committee meeting.”

Link recommended continuing with the hybrid schedule for now.

Resident Pauline Grady said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is presenting its new guidelines this week that clearly state it’s safe for the kids to go back to school, and wanted to know if the district was going to be following those guidelines or is it waiting for March.

Link said, “We will review the guidelines when they’re released in their entirety and we also have been taking our guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, so yes.”