On behalf of students, parents, and concerned community members, we request that the Montgomery Township School District extend virtual learning at MHS through the end of January. We appreciate the prudence of our administration’s decision to transition to an online learning model for the week of January 3rd, 2022, but the most recent statistics indicate that the pandemic has only worsened in the past week. On January 3rd, daily cases of COVID-19 in the entire United States surpassed one million, exceeding peaks reached even during the winter of 2021. More specifically, the average number of cases per day within the state of New Jersey is currently 29,367 — more than four times the previous maximum of 7,411 from January 9th, 2021. While the Omicron variant is not as severe as previously encountered forms of COVID-19, dramatic increases to both the number of cases detected and the number of patients hospitalized send a clear message: recent trends must not be ignored; if we insist on congregating, this virus will spread — from healthy teenage students, to middle-aged parents, to vulnerable grandparents.

Proactively, several prominent universities such as Yale and Duke have already announced transitions to remote learning until early February. In New Jersey, districts such as Montville and South Brunswick have introduced a virtual option that will last, at minimum, into mid-January. We ask that the Montgomery Township School Board swiftly follow suit and ensure that remote learning options remain available at MHS in some capacity until at least the end of January. We understand and sympathize with concerns that virtual learning takes a developmental toll on young children, but these concerns are not valid to the same extent for high school students, most of whom have access to well-developed networks of support that have allowed them in the past — and would enable them again — to adapt to online learning, at least until the spread of the Omicron variant is controlled.

While vaccination rates in Montgomery Township are encouragingly high, recent research has found that the efficacy of vaccines against Omicron is significantly lower than it has been for previous strands of COVID-19; a paper published in Medrxiv puts efficacy rates at a shockingly low 37%. Our district must consider the changing nature of the pandemic and act accordingly to protect MHS families, many of which comprise elderly and immunocompromised relatives to whom COVID-19 poses a serious threat.

We hope that the Board will consider the concerns of the Montgomery community and act quickly to protect its students by instituting a virtual learning option through the end of January, 2022.