Hundreds of Cape students age 12 and older have signed up for school-based COVID-19 vaccination clinics being offered over the next two weeks, local health and education officials said.
Barnstable County is supplying first doses of the Pfizer vaccine for clinics in several Cape school districts, starting Thursday at Monomoy Regional High School, Barnstable County Public Health Nurse Deirdre Arvidson said.
She said the county hopes to dispense 1,100 to 1,200 first doses in Cape schools between now and early June.
As of Tuesday, 159 people had signed up for the Monomoy clinic, 146 for a clinic being put on by the Nauset Regional School District and 103 for a Friday clinic at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, for which registration was just made available Monday, Arvidson said.
By Alisa Magnotta
Brewster, Eastham, Orleans and Wellfleet residents voted in favor of a $131.8 million Nauset Regional High School building project. Voters also gave the go-ahead a few years ago to build a new Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich for $128 million. Bourne recently built a new $40 million intermediate school to replace an aging one.
In addition to the bricks and mortar, taxpayers pay the annual operating costs to educate the students. In the Nauset district, we pay approximately $20,000 per year to educate one student. That is a whopping $260,000 investment per child for kindergarten through high school graduation.
HARWICH The second town meeting in a row held outside to lessen the potential impact of COVID-19 was not an easy one for voters to endure.
Harwich Town Moderator Michael Ford warned voters at the outset that a hat might be needed as Canada geese were flying overhead. An osprey clutching a fish in its talons, circled, landing on its nest atop a light pole on the Monomoy Regional High School athletic field, the pleading of hungry young birds momentarily interrupting the meeting debate below.
But it was a piercingly cold spring wind sweeping over the field that was especially hard to endure, and it winnowed participants from the more than 250 that constituted a quorum at the start of the meeting to just over 100 by the final article.
Most high schools on the Cape will beat that state deadline.
Five schools Barnstable High School, Falmouth High School, Sturgis Charter Public School in Hyannis, Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School in South Yarmouth and Monomoy Regional High School in Harwich plan to resume in-person classes five days a week starting Monday.
Two high schools Mashpee Middle High School and Bourne High School brought students back to the buildings full-time this past Monday.
And Nauset Regional High School in Eastham plans to have all students in their physical classrooms by May 10.
Only Sandwich High School, Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Bourne and Cape Cod Regional Technical High School in Harwich are waiting to resume full-time, in-person classes until May 17.
For months, students at Cape Cod Regional Technical High School have been spending time every week refurbishing bikes.At first, 11th grader Shannen Hardy said most of them had no idea what to do. I did not know a lick of it, she said. Taking them apart and rebuilding them definitely helped me learn, said Alyssa Bach, another 11th grader taking part in the effort.The bike project got underway as part of the Skills USA program at the high school.Students in the program learn more than the standard curriculum including personal, workplace and technical skills.Peggy Riley-O’Brian is the program coordinator and a teacher at the high school.“They become well-rounded in their trade, but also in other things,” Riley-O’Brian said. “One of the tenets of the organization is that we do community service. The school has long supported Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod. This year, Riley-O’Brian came up with the idea of gifting donated and then refurbished bikes to children in nee