School board weighs COVID options before public input, decision Sept. 16

 

September 16, 2021



“So, it looks like we’re headed back to school on Monday (Sept. 13), then,” Board Chair Jennifer Axtell said to the Hot Springs County School Board at the close of its Sept. 9 meeting to discuss the school district’s COVID response plan.

Superintendent Dustin Hunt added that, if there were additional changes the board wished to make, it would need to take action on those by Sept. 16, while also providing the opportunity for public comment during that same meeting.

While Hunt concurred that students needed to return to school, he also agreed that the district had “let (its) guard down a little bit,” concurring with Vice-Chair Sherman Skelton that the degree of contagion “caught us a little bit by surprise.”

In addition to reminding staff not to have activities that can’t exercise social distancing, Hunt pointed out that the district still has a number of passive measures in place to help make students safer, including furniture that promotes social distancing.

Hunt also noted that any illness procedures need to be explicitly established as policy, so they can actually be enforced with the knowledge that they’re supported by the administration.

“That’s a hard thing sometimes, to send a student home when they don’t really want to go home,” said Hunt, who sees communication with parents as essential, through letters home and checklists of symptoms that parents can look for.

Although any plans approved by the board on Sept. 16 would be slated for review in January, Hunt added that the board doesn’t necessarily need to wait that long, if more immediate concerns are raised.

Axtell suggested “maybe getting away from shaming people for personal decisions,” such as whether parents choose to send their students to school masked or not, while Board Treasurer Joe Martinez lamented the lack of discussion about implementing a hybrid model, if the district’s COVID numbers rise enough that a closure would otherwise need to be considered.

Hunt voiced reservations about a hybrid model, as “not wildly successful” in other school districts, with complications arising from teachers having to juggle between asynchronous and synchronous communication with different groups of students at different times.

“They’re struggling to provide that instruction to them at the exact same time, because they don’t stop learning,” Hunt said. “They don’t just have two days of instruction for all students.”

Skelton outlined three options for parents whose students are exposed to someone at school who has tested positive for COVID, in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, to wit:

1. If your student is symptom-free and fully vaccinated, with at least two weeks since their final dose, and both they and the person who tested positive were wearing masks, no quarantine is necessary,

2. If your student is symptom-free and wears a mask at school for 10 days, or wears a mask at school for seven days, submits to COVID-testing on the fifth day and tests negative, they no longer have to wear a mask.

3. If your student quarantines at home for 10 days, or quarantines at home for seven days, submits to COVID-testing on the fifth day, tests negative and is symptom-free on the seventh day, they may return to school, but students in quarantine who are not feeling ill are still expected to connect to classes remotely on a daily basis to avoid being counted as absent.

Hunt, Board Trustee Will Farrell, School Nurse Brenna Huckfeldt and Hot Springs County Public Health Officer Dr. Vernon Miller all acknowledged the practical challenges of enforcing such responses consistently, especially given the resistance of many toward wearing masks, while Skelton spoke in favor of having COVID-testing “incentivized.”.

Although Miller described social distancing and masking as relatively effective risk-decreasing measures, he nonetheless deemed them as secondary in importance to vaccinations.“The only thing that’s going to get us out of this is immunization,” Miller said. Miller conceded that vaccinations are even more contentious in public opinion than masks.

“Sometimes, when people have asked us to do things, they’re thinking there’s a silver bullet for this virus, and there is not,” Hunt said. “There’s a lot of things that we can do to make it better but we are not going to fix this as a school district. We can lessen the impact, and do everything to keep our students safe. I think the days we were out allowed people to get healthy, and stopped some spread, and now, it’s time to start back up again.”

 

Reader Comments(0)

 
 

Powered by ROAR Online Publication Software from Lions Light Corporation
© Copyright 2024