The Perry Community School District Board of Directors voted unanimously Wednesday to revise the COVID-19 quarantine rules for staff and students that appear in the district’s Return to Learn (R2L) plan.
Instead of 10 days in quarantine, infected individuals may now spend 5 days in quarantine followed by 5 days with a facemask. With about 36 PCSD staff members and 99 students currently in quarantine, the revised rules are intended to reduce the pressure on workers on the job and keep the district operating.
“We want to make sure that we can keep the doors open and keep students in the building and bring staff back,” said PCSD Board President Linda Andorf. “As someone who has gone in and subbed, we do have a lot of staff who are out, and we do have staff that are covering many, many classes, and oftentimes they are giving up their planning period in order to cover someone else’s class.”
According to the former R2L plan approved by the school board Jan. 10, anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 — whether student, faculty or staff — must quarantine at home for 10 days and “may return after day 10 if symptoms are resolving and have had no fever for 24 hours without the use of fever-reducing medication.”
Under the revised R2L plan approved Wednesday, anyone testing positive “is required to stay home for 5 days” but “may end isolation after day 5 if they are symptom free, willing and able to wear a mask consistently and correctly through day 10.”
Andorf said the revised rules will “ease the burden on the district.”
PCSD Board member Eddie Diaz said the board’s action would “help reduce learning loss,” but he emphasized that “nobody is going to be asked to come back if they’re sick.”
Board member Travis Landgrebe also supported the revisions.
District Superintendent Clark Wicks, currently in quarantine, participated in the meeting via a conference call. He said the new rules will take effect Monday, Jan. 31 and will be retroactive for people currently in quarantine.
“We need a couple of days to communicate with students, staff, families, community,” Wicks said. “Everybody has to do their part to make this work. It will take a couple of days to get all of the communication taken care of.”
Directors Kenia Alarcon and Jim Lutmer were absent from the 2 p.m. meeting.
With kids and school staff coming down with the virus at an ever increasing rate, it appears that COVID hasn’t been informed of the school board’s decision that it’s only permitted to make our children sick for five days at most, even though it has attended every one of the school board’s meetings.
In general, comments to the website that are made under fake names or fake email addresses do not receive the moderator’s approval and so do not appear. It is a dismally frequent occurrence that people with very strong opinions yet lack the strength to stand by them in the open. Such a comment has come to our attention today, made in reply to your last by someone using the fake name of Jed Clampett and the email address of InformedConsentAdvocacy@ProtonMail,com. We share it here as a corpus vile for dissection because it appears to contain several of the pathologies that have so sadly disrupted what might have been a more orderly and united response to SARS-CoV-2 these last two years. Here is the comment as submitted:
Calm down, Karen. The OLIGARCHS want us all paranoid and dependent on their failed systems. The PCR tests are unreliable and give off FALSE POSITIVES. Do your own research on what’s in the SO-CALLED “VACCINES”, if you can get past all the censorship. MEDICAL MALPRACTICE is a MONSTROSITY.
We would be interested to hear your reflections.
I wrote this because I feel badly for all of our kids and teachers getting sick. They bring it home to their families, and the pandemic continues. Simple as that. I am tired of seeing so many sacrificed, mostly for political gain.