BATON ROUGE - Public schools throughout the capital area are continuing to closely monitor students for COVID-19 to maintain a safe, productive environment for learning.

Taylor Gast, the Public Information Director for Baton Rouge Schools, says since the students and faculty have returned from the break, COVID cases have gone down and the number of children who are learning from home has increased slightly.

Officials say it is too early to fully gauge the impact of COVID on students following the holiday break but say so far, so good.

Even with a lower number of coronavirus cases, more students are taking classes online to avoid the virus.

"We've seen a slight uptick in our counts of students wanting to learn virtually as they would in person, but relatively it stayed about the same. We've seen maybe a couple hundred going virtual here or there," Gast said about the parish-wide public schools.

Each and every student is being screened for any symptoms of the virus daily. If students show symptoms of COVID-19, they are isolated and sent home right away.

"We have high risk and low risk symptoms. That is a breakdown
of the COVID symptoms such as a cough, fever, sore throat, etc.," District Special Projects Director Stacey Dupre said.

In some cases, entire classrooms of students are quarantined to
avoid a potential COVID outbreak.