Following the winter holidays, Nome Public Schools (NPS) and the Bering Strait School District (BSSD) are returning to in-person instruction which began Monday, January 11th, while the Lower Yukon School District (LYSD) will proceed with a distance-learning model. NPS announced last Thursday via a social media post that they will be returning to in-person learning with “all COVID-19 mitigation procedures still in effect.” Ahead of the announcement, during a Nome School Board meeting in early December, NPS Superintendent Jamie Burgess spoke about the conditions required to return to in-person instruction. “So, if everything works exceptionally well, we’ll be welcoming students back in on January 11th. January 4th was always planned to be a distance-learning week because we will have a significant number of staff and families traveling over the winter break. We want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to observe quarantine and that we actually have enough staff to hold school.”