BY SYDNEY HOOVER
After meetings lasting late into the evening, numerous revisions to a reopening plan and dozens of public comments and emails from parents and teachers, the Eudora School Board re-opened the district’s buildings for students to come back to school full time this week.
The School Board deviated from recommendations provided by Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health in a 5-2 vote Aug. 31. At the time, the county’s positivity rate was just under 5%, though health officials placed school districts in the “yellow” phase, meaning Eudora should be in a hybrid model.
“We issued the guidance because that's what we believe is best,” said Dan Partridge, director for Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health. “Our metrics say they should be operating in yellow. And so that's what we would advise them to do.”
As the first day of school approached, the city of Eudora’s rate was about 5%, according to Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.
The Eudora School Board will meet again at 7 p.m. tonight. In addition to regularly scheduled items, the agenda includes continued discussion on the coronavirus and the return to school.
With around 79% of students heading back to school full time and 21% opting to learn remotely for the time being, school administrators have looked to Eudora’s “Navigating a Return to Normal” plan to adjust to health and safety guidelines.
A school day in the time of COVID
In the Eudora school buildings, students are greeted in the morning by staff taking their temperatures and hallways are labeled for one-way traffic. Xs are displayed on bleachers throughout the gym 6 feet apart.
“We do our best to keep students distanced, when social distancing is an option,” district spokesman Mark Dodge said in a phone call with the Eudora Times last week.
Dodge said the schools are “doing what we can” to keep students spaced at lunchtime as they take off their masks to eat. He said they are limiting the number of students allowed in the commons or lunchroom area, and have additional space to eat in the gym and outside.
The district’s plan states those inside school buildings must wear masks at all times except when eating, participating in activities where it would not be safe to wear a mask, as well as in instances where wearing a mask would be dangerous for their health or work. It did not provide specific examples of these situations.
The plan provided during an Aug. 6 board meeting is labeled as a draft. No more recent drafts have been included in public board agendas, and when asked about an up-to-date version, Dodge said the plan was still in a drafting phase as of Thursday and needed to be approved by the Unified Command.
The draft states staff should be regularly disinfecting their workspace, such as their classroom, should practice “good hygiene” and should be familiar with response plans created by the district.
Dodge said teachers went through seven days of professional learning prior to schools reopening on how to go about teaching amid the pandemic, and the district set objectives and expectations for the staff. Time was built into the school day schedule to allow teachers time to disinfect classrooms in between classes, Dodge said.
“Our teachers take this seriously,” he said. “It's not a debate.”
At a district level, there is not a set schedule for cleaning buildings with the district’s Clorox 360 machines, which are being rotated between buildings, Dodge said. In a hybrid model, the machines would be brought into the schools on Wednesdays when students are all remote, as well as on weekends.
Planning for crisis
Language in the district’s plan for reopening is unclear on what would lead to the schools shutting down or how the district would respond in the event of a large outbreak.
Dodge said the decision would ultimately depend on where it happened, how many cases there were and how many close contacts are linked to those cases.
The draft plan says in the case of a single individual with symptoms or a positive test, that person should immediately be sent home if they are in the building. Within one to two hours, administrators should determine whether or not to send those in the building home for the day, and throughout the day should communicate with local and state health departments for guidance, assess the impact of a school closure and request a substitute teacher if needed.
Board President Eric Votaw said the board’s goal is to have procedures in place that would create enough precautions that in the event there were a positive case in the district, it would not lead to needing to quarantine an entire class or close a school.
“Hopefully we've taken enough precautions to ensure that it isn't something that spreads,” Votaw said.
The board has not had any discussions over how to respond if there were to be an outbreak, hospitalization or death in the district, Votaw said, but if the situation were to arise, respect and sensitivity for the individuals involved would be at the forefront of their conversations.
Dodge said they have worked with other area school districts and the Unified Command to develop a plan for addressing any serious outbreak or illness, but did not provide specifics of what that involved.
Partridge provided the Eudora Times with the Unified Command’s guidance for schools on responding to a serious outbreak.
Per the guidance, schools should have a plan in place for notifying families should there be a positive case in the school while maintaining privacy for the individual who tested positive. The district should also communicate with the health department.
Any room the individual has been in for a significant amount of time in the building should be closed and sanitized, and some classes, especially in an elementary school setting, may need to be sent home. Additionally, school districts are mandated infectious disease reporters, and therefore have the ability to contact trace without parental or patient consent, which the guidance says should be done immediately after hearing of the positive case.
In the case of an outbreak, the guidance says schools should work in conjunction with the health department to determine if the school was the source of the outbreak and whether the building should be closed, and for how long. If a building closes, any extracurricular activities at that building should also be canceled.
COVID in Eudora
Deciding how to move forward will never be easy, Votaw said, but with virus data specifically looking at Eudora, it could make the best option a little more clear. Votaw said while the district will continue taking Douglas County as a whole into consideration, they have been regularly requesting data looking only at Eudora’s cases.
In a School Board meeting on Aug. 14, Partridge told board members he had received numerous emails from residents expressing they believed Eudora did not have the same level of cases as other areas of Douglas County like Lawrence, where the University of Kansas has added hundreds of cases to the county’s positivity rate.
Partridge said this wasn’t true — Eudora had a similar positivity rate as Lawrence and other towns in Douglas County at the time of the meeting.
Votaw said he hopes families are taking as many precautions as they can to stop the spread of the virus in order to keep schools open. He said he hopes to keep schooling as consistent as possible, rather than switching between learning models with every little change in data, to provide some continuity for students, parents and staff.
Votaw said board members will continue to monitor changes in data.
“This will be an evolving, ongoing evaluation,” Votaw said. “I think it's reasonable to assume that we, the board, every couple of weeks … will be, you know, meeting to make sure that we continue on the path that we want to be on as a district.”
Reach reporter Sydney Hoover at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
To donate to support our community journalism, please go to this link: tinyurl.com/y4u7stxj
Comments