Kelly Kenoyer
Students of all ages will be required to wear masks in schools in Fall, according to Oregon Department of Education guidelines released Wednesday, July 22.
The order requires all students and staff to wear face coverings inside school buildings, with exemptions for students with disabilities who require exemptions in their individualized exemption plans.
The guidelines will also require limited interactions between different groups of students, so there will be no more “passing time” as students know it, Superintendent Tom Yahraes said. “It tells us we can’t we can’t have a 7-period day with 650 kids going from class to class.”
Students will be placed in cohorts of no more than 100 children, which will help facilitate contact tracing in case of an outbreak, and limit transmission in case such a problem occurs.
Students will have more limited movement to avoid contacts between kids, Yahraes said. “We need to be very organized in case we have to contact trace. We need to know where that student has been,” he said.
If a student or staffer is exposed, he foresees “quarantining 72 hours, monitoring to 14 weeks. Whatever those guidelines will be, we will follow.”
For Sweet Home School District, the new guidance on face coverings may also make it easier to get students to school. “For a 70 passenger bus we were looking at potentially 15 to 20 students, but we may now be able to get upwards of between maybe 25 to 30 kids on a bus, Yahraes said.
The school district sent out a survey last week to see the initial preference each family has for their students in the fall.
District Coordinator of Instructional Technology Colleen Henry said the first option is an “onsite hybrid, which means students can learn in person, or if they’re sick one day, they can still make up that work or if they need to stay home,” while the other is 100% distance learning with the current teachers and current curriculum.
The results of the survey will help the district solidify a plan which must take building capacity, student enrollment, and social distancing into account, along with setting students into “cohorts” to limit transmission and facilitate case tracking in case of a coronavirus outbreak.
As of Monday, July 27, the district had received 614 responses to the parent survey. The data shows an average of 25 percent of parents have selected the new distance-learning option for their student or students.
Henry said, “We got a lot of questions and a lot of worries. And so that’s going to help us make sure whatever plan we come up with takes all of that feedback into consideration.”
The survey results also give Yahraes a good sense of how many students the district will need to accommodate, which may help determine whether gymnasiums and other communal areas need to be used as classrooms to allow social distancing.
“We want to facilitate having kids back, as well as serving those students at home, that it’s the choice of that family,” Yahraes said. The district expects to see a few more ODE guideline releases before schools open in Fall, but plans are starting to fall into place.