Photo by WJON.com's Jim Maurice

ST. CLOUD -- Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made a stop at St. Cloud's South Junior High Tuesday greeting the students and the staff as they ended their school day.

Walz says as for the Minnesota State High School League's Decision to move forward with football and volleyball this fall he's optimistic it will go well as long as the districts continue to follow the state guidelines.

If a school is in a hybrid because their numbers are high, they won't be playing in inter school athletics, but we do think there is the capacity to get this right.

Walz says he'd also like to get more extracurricular activities started as well.

They do go hand in hand, whether it's speech and debate or whether it's concert band or football, those are the things that round out life and we want to make sure we can do all those.

On Monday Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the state is seeing an average of about 60 new COVID-19 cases in our schools each day. Walz says they were prepared to see some cases and that's why they wanted the flexible learning models for the districts.

I think that's what we anticipated, we certainly were prepared for outbreaks to spiker higher if that would happen and to adjust accordingly and to make sure that we're coming into testing.

Walz says what keeps him up at night is the future unknowns of what the longterm damage from having COVID-19 might be on individuals.

We're only six months into this, what if five years down the road we find out there's lasting damage by people who had supposedly mild cases of this?

Earlier in the day, the governor was up in Moorhead at an elementary school. The events were the ninth and tenth stops in his statewide Safe Learning Tour.

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