With coronavirus cases surging, in-person learning is being suspended at 11 public schools in suburban Montgomery County, and another 89 schools are at risk for similar action, officials said Tuesday.

       Montgomery County interim superintendent Monifa McKnight announced that the 11 higher-infection schools would move to virtual learning for 14 calendar days, effective Wednesday. But McKnight pledged that Maryland’s largest school district, with 209 schools, would keep prioritizing in-classroom learning.

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       “When it is possible to do so safely, we must continue to preserve the in-person learning experience and mitigate the learning disruption that the pandemic has already caused,” she said. “For the majority of our schools, in-person learning can and will continue. We have mitigation measures that keep schools safe and lower transmission rates.”

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       Among those measures, McKnight cited the school system’s mask mandate and a recent decision to provide KN95 masks to teachers and staff this week. The district is also providing at-home rapid tests during the next two weeks and a districtwide screening program to identify students who test positive for the virus.

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       As of 6 a.m. Monday, 5,680 students and staff reported having tested positive over the winter break, including 4,677 during the break’s last five days.

       “This absolutely reflects a trend that we are seeing across the Washington, D.C., region,” McKnight said.

       Many employees are testing positive, leading to “abnormally high staff absences across our school system, including among teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers,” McKnight said. The absences exacerbate staffing shortages that were already a problem, she said.

       School officials did not provide numbers that reflect staffing problems.

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       McKnight described a new system of showing school-by-school infection levels, sorting schools by three colors. Schools are designated as red when 5 percent or more of students and staff have tested positive in the previous 14 days, at which point a decision is made about whether to go virtual. Schools are labeled yellow when their cases approach that threshold, with 3 percent to 5 percent of students and staff affected. Schools are marked as green when cases are below 3 percent.

       The 11 district schools that are switching to virtual are designated as red schools, while 89 are yellow.

       Students will start with full-day live instruction on Thursday, following a day of teacher planning and synchronous instruction, school officials said. Montgomery County schools were closed Monday and Tuesday because of inclement weather.