KITCHENER -- The Waterloo Catholic District School Board says it's going to need as many as a dozen new teachers to cover its virtual elementary classes this fall.

Officials say they're hoping to have those vacancies filled in the next couple of weeks. While it's later than they might have hoped, Supt. Jason Connolly says things are "moving along well."

"Creating a virtual school, you'd want a long time to plan for it. Six months, a year, something like that, and we're putting it together in a few weeks," he said after a school board trustee meeting on Monday night.

"So we're going to have some growing pains, that's kind of inevitable. I think things are moving along well and moving along quickly."

Trustees heard Monday night that most of the students who are switching their mode of learning are moving out of the classroom and into distance learning. That's a similar trend to what the public school board has seen.

The process to hire more teachers for virtual classrooms is now underway, with five offers going out this week and another seven interviews scheduled in the coming days.

While that's a hurtle to overcome, it hasn't been the only one.

"It's not just the staffing piece. It's the setting up the technology and the processes and getting infrastructure built around it," Connolly said.

"We're kind of doing that on the fly, we're still doing it as we kind of go through the launch and kind of figure things out."

The application to change learning methods closed on Monday evening, but there were some technical difficulties that were expected to be resolved the following day.

The school board said 877 elementary students will switch from in-person learning to virtual learning. There will also be 101 students moving from virtual learning to in-person classes, meaning St. Isidore will increase by 766 students.

Students will move to their new learning mode on Oct. 13.