Highland Park High School and Deerfield High School have returned to a fully In-Person model during this past week. After assessing the threat to education that Omicron posed to our school district on Monday and requiring that all students and teachers participating in extracurriculars take a SHIELD Covid test, Superintendent Bruce Law and the school board decided to move forward with opening the High Schools entirely on Tuesday. This decision was rash and risky due to the fact that the SHIELD test results would not be available until halfway through Tuesday's school day at the earliest.

Despite widespread concern and backlash over school opening fully on Tuesday, Superintendent Bruce Law and the school board still decided to have in-person learning anyways. The day went as poorly as was expected. Students were removed from classes in the middle of their education due to a positive covid test, and the rest of the students could only watch as they were supposed to continue learning with no disruption. Of the 1,128 persons tested on Monday, 66 have tested positive. This is an infection rate of 6.5%, and that is just from the people who have been SHIELD tested.

Now, it seems as though Superintendent Bruce Law and the school board have not learned from the mistake of opening school on Tuesday, and are again deciding to open school on Wednesday. Again, they note that they have received many emails from concerned parents and students alike, though they do not seem to recognize the true danger of keeping schools open. Many students have family members that have pre-existing health conditions that would make contracting the Omicron variant deadly. By continuing to require that all healthy students attend school, Superintendent Bruce Law and the school board are putting the life and well-being of hundreds of families at risk. This petition asks that they allow the district to return to the successful model of being online, as we did in the previous year when Covid was extremely dire. With the full implementation of online learning, it is possible to return to school once again in a few weeks, once the first Omicron wave has passed and case numbers return to their more normal levels.