A few Den­ver area kids entered school build­ings for the first time since spring Mon­day as two dis­tricts — Cher­ry Creek and Dou­glas Coun­ty — forged ahead with their reopen­ing plans.

At Wal­nut Hills Ele­men­tary in Cen­ten­ni­al, a parade of par­ents dropped off masked fifth-graders in the ear­ly morn­ing for the first day of the 2020–21 aca­d­e­m­ic year — and the first ele­ment of the Cher­ry Creek School District’s plan for in-per­son learn­ing for the vast major­i­ty of its 55,000 stu­dents.

Cher­ry Creek is tak­ing a cau­tious approach in its first week back in the class­room, with each ele­men­tary grade get­ting its own ded­i­cat­ed day in-per­son this week before every­one is back in school next week.

“As a dis­trict, we didn’t take this light­ly,” said Teolyn Bour­bon­nie, prin­ci­pal of Wal­nut Hills, which has an enroll­ment of 203 stu­dents. “We’ve done the ade­quate amount of plan­ning and putting in place safe­ty mea­sures to bring back the kids.”

Those mea­sures include masks for all stu­dents and staff, stag­gered lunch times and recess­es to keep crowd­ing to a min­i­mum and direc­tion­al tape in the hall­ways to con­trol the flow of lit­tle feet through­out the build­ing. There are around 40 kids in Wal­nut Hills’ fifth-grade class, which lined up aside two rows of orange cones out­side the school Mon­day morn­ing before the 8 a.m. start­ing bell sounded.

“It’s great to have the kids back in school — we’re all excit­ed,” Bour­bon­nie said. “Kids need to be in school.”

Still, the year begins with uncer­tain­ty as sev­er­al schools around the coun­try that have reopened in recent days have had to revis­it their deci­sions as cas­es of COVID-19 began circulating.

Wal­nut Hills Ele­men­tary par­ent Jeff Ross said he’s not wor­ried about the return to school for his son, Bryce, whose third-grade class com­mences in-per­son instruc­tion Wednes­day. Ross was drop­ping his son off at the school Mon­day morn­ing for a sum­mer school pro­gram that has been held at Wal­nut Hills for the past month or so.

“We’re look­ing for­ward to it,” Ross said of in-per­son learn­ing, which end­ed abrupt­ly in March as the virus began its spread across Col­orado. “The struc­ture of remote learn­ing (in the spring) was good, but my boy didn’t take to it. It was a chal­lenge for us to keep him on task.”

Con­vinc­ing his kid to wear a mask? No big deal, Ross said: “He’s real­ly into Star Wars right now so he’s into being Darth Vader.”

Cher­ry Creek and Dou­glas Coun­ty are the biggest dis­tricts in the metro area start­ing the school year with at least some in-per­son instruc­tion. West­min­ster Pub­lic Schools is open­ing its build­ings to the major­i­ty of its stu­dent body on Thurs­day, and Maple­ton Pub­lic Schools in Adams Coun­ty is reopen­ing with in-per­son class­es lat­er this month.

Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, the sec­ond-largest school dis­trict in Col­orado, has put off in-per­son learn­ing for at least the first two weeks of the school year, while the biggest dis­trict in the state, Den­ver Pub­lic Schools, has post­poned the open­ing of schools until at least mid-Octo­ber.

The resump­tion of school in the Unit­ed States has prompt­ed much debate — and politi­ciza­tion — as the sta­bi­liza­tion of COVID-19 case num­bers in late May gave way to a surge in infec­tions as peo­ple began con­gre­gat­ing more, bring­ing the country’s case­load to near­ly 5.4 mil­lion and deaths to 170,000.

While the res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease the coro­n­avirus caus­es over­whelm­ing­ly tar­gets old­er peo­ple and those with exist­ing health prob­lems, chil­dren are not entire­ly immune to it. Ear­li­er this month, the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics report­ed that near­ly 180,000 new cas­es of COVID-19 in chil­dren were record­ed in the Unit­ed States from July 9 to Aug. 6, a 90% increase in child cas­es over that time period.

The acad­e­my did note, how­ev­er, that “avail­able data indi­cat­ed that COVID-19-asso­ci­at­ed hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death is uncom­mon in children.”

Many advo­cates of in-per­son learn­ing note that noth­ing can match the val­ue of face-to-face instruc­tion, espe­cial­ly for chil­dren with spe­cial needs or those who may not be able to afford the tech­nol­o­gy required for learn­ing over the internet.

Kasey Ellis, pres­i­dent of the Cher­ry Creek Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion, said the union worked dili­gent­ly with the dis­trict over the last few months to fig­ure out how to best approach the reopen­ing. Even if Cher­ry Creek is forced to close again, depend­ing on how coro­n­avirus behaves in Ara­pa­hoe Coun­ty, Ellis said, there is val­ue to hav­ing at least a bit of face time and inter­ac­tion between teach­ers and students.

“It’s impor­tant to make a per­son­al con­nec­tion with stu­dents,” she said.