NORWAY — The Norway-Vulcan School District will shift elementary classes Thursday to remote learning through at least Jan. 21 to counter a “dramatic spike” of COVID-19 cases among students and staff, officials announced Wednesday.

For now, the high school and middle school, which have not seen the same surge, will stay with on-site instruction “as long as we are able to safely do so,” Superintendent Lou Steigerwald stated in an email to students, parents and staff Wednesday.

The district hopes to resume in-person elementary classes Jan. 24.

Students from early kindergarten through fifth grade were sent home Wednesday with iPads to accommodate the move online. Classes will maintain their regular daily schedule, according to Steigerwald.

“We were barely able to run our elementary school today (Wednesday) due to staffing issues,” Steigerwald wrote in the email, also posted on the district’s Facebook page. “Additionally, due to the number of students who have to be tested, we have exceeded our staff capacity to get kids tested in a timely manner once we learn of a positive result in a classroom.”

The elementary school was dealing with a problem as well of rapid test false negatives among people who thought they had the common cold only to turn up positive a few days later, the superintendent said. He attributed it to the variant taking a longer time to be detectable under the rapid test.

“We did not experience this phenomenon prior to this point in the pandemic,” Steigerwald said, adding, “Unfortunately, we have also had parents send kids to school who were actively sick despite our earlier plea not to do so.”

Said Steigerwald, “If your child is ill, please keep them home. The symptoms of coronavirus include: fever, sore throat, coughing, headache, stomach ailments. Of late we have seen positive cases begin with a mild sore throat or dry cough. Any child with a fever should be kept at home until their temperature returns to normal for 24 hours without medication.”