‘Faces in person.’ Fayette welcomes more than 7,000 students for the first time in a year.

At Lexington’s Veterans Park Elementary Monday, teachers in masks lined up excitedly at the front door at 7 a.m. to welcome and check the temperatures and masks of young students who were arriving for their first day of in-person learning this school year.

“It will be really nice to have students so we have those faces in person with us,” said teacher Amy Ray.

One by one, students who passed through a thermal temperature scanner were told, “You’re good,” and escorted to pick up breakfast in a foyer and then go on to their classrooms by staff members -- not their parents -- under new COVID-19 rules.

The coronavirus pandemic would touch just about everything else about the school day -- from pre-ordered lunches delivered to desks to practicing handwashing techniques while standing in the line to the bathroom.

About 7,082 of Fayette County’s 8,990 students in grades K-2 returned to campuses Monday, the first kids to do so since the COVID-19 pandemic shut schools down in March 2020.

With 86 percent -- about 298 -- of Veterans Parks kindergarten through second grade students returning Monday, classrooms were filled and students sat side by side at desks surrounded by personal protection dividers. Students had totes at their desks for their individual supplies.

The number of students allowed on the playground at one time will be cut in half. Teachers will spend much time in the next two weeks emphasizing behavior and structure, principal Molly Dabney said. Dabney took Wags, the school’s therapy dog, to meet several students in class and in the hall Monday morning.

“I think it’s gone incredibly smoothly. We got everybody in the building before 7:15 a.m.,” said Dabney. “It’s almost like business as usual. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a year since we’ve been in here and we’ve been able to do this as efficiently as we have.”

Overall, said district spokeswoman Lisa Deffendall at about 10:30 a.m. “We are having a very smooth first day of in-person learning.”

Students in other grades will continue to learn from home until they return to in person instruction. Third through fifth graders will be the next to return on March 3-5. A shortage of school bus drivers and child nutrition workers is preventing students from other grades from coming back.

All schools have developed Health and Safety plans.

No children at Veterans Park had temperatures this morning that sent them home.

Fayette, the second largest district in the state, is among the last school districts in Kentucky to return to in-person learning. Until recently, a high number of coronavirus cases had kept students learning remotely.

Ruth Annetts, a Veterans Park parent, said Monday that “it was definitely time given the science” for in-person classes to restart, and she liked the approach of starting with younger children first.

Annetts said from a health care perspective, school board members have made the best decisions they could with the information they had.

“This has been a painful, challenging, and difficult year and we still have a way to go,” Fayette school board chairman Tyler Murphy said Sunday night in a Facebook post. “But the resilience, determination, passion, compassion, and energy that I’ve seen in our district -- the qualities that helped us make it to this point -- will continue to guide us during this transition. “

This story was originally published February 22, 2021 at 8:11 AM.