BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

MASSENA -- The Massena Central School District has made significant adjustments to both their meal schedule and online instruction as they adapt to functioning in a pandemic.

Superintendent Pat Brady said they are now serving five days’ worth of meals on one day per week, and online rotate on an every-other-day-schedule.

He said serving a bulk meal is “to increase safety for both our staff as well as the community.”

The bulk meal package includes five days of breakfasts and lunches. Instead of, for example, a prepared sandwich, it comes with bread, meat, cheese, veggies, quarts of milk instead of pints, and other items.

“We will still be distributing those meals at the five locations we have been throughout the closing,” he said.

There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 among food service workers or bus drivers, the superintendent said.

“I don’t think we’ve had one person even call in sick the whole time,” he said. “Everybody’s been excellent showing up and providing the meals … and also the bus drivers who have been showing up and driving them to the locations.”

Brady said the meals are “trial and error” since it’s impossible to guess how many people will show up to get the free food.

He said on April 20, they made 80 more meals than on the previous week but still ran out, “so we’re going to need to adjust that upward.”

For online classes, teachers have moved to what Brady described as “an A/B schedule.” That means classes meet on a rotating basis.

He said doing daily lessons online was “found to be a bit overwhelming, for the students particularly.”

Brady called the online lessons a “strong alternative” to traditional face-to-face instruction, but it “doesn’t replace the teacher in the classroom and the services we’ve been providing.”

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