Administrators’ Covid-19 plan too restrictive for board

A Covid-19 safety plan recommended Monday by administrators and designed to keep students in classrooms full time during a lingering pandemic proved too restrictive for the Port Washington-Saukville School Board.

With some members saying the proposed plan was too quick to require masks and quarantining, the board instead adopted protocols that don’t mandate such measures unless schools reach higher Covid-19 positivity rates than the ones favored by administrators.

Under the recommendation from administrators who comprise the Port Washington-Saukville School District’s Covid Response Team, students and staff members at a particular school would have been required to wear masks if 2% or more of the school population contracted the coronavirus. If the positivity rate was less than 2%, face masks would have been encouraged but not required. 

“It’s possible that one building would be under some restrictions and other buildings would not,” Duane Woelfel, the district’s director of special services, said.

At each of the district’s three elementary schools, 2% of the students and staff members equate to between six to eight people. At Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Port Washington High School, it’s 16 people.

But adopting the suggestion of member Doug Miller, the board decided not to make masks mandatory unless at least 5% of the students and staff members at a particular school test positive for the virus.

“The 2% seems a little low when you look at schools like Saukville Elementary,” where 2% of the school’s population is six people, Miller said. 

Woelfel, however, said that he recalls the 2% threshold only being reached once last school year when there were a number of Covid-19 cases at Lincoln Elementary School.

If a mask mandate is enacted, it would last for at least 20 days — roughly the incubation period for the Covid-19 Delta variant — and until the positivity rate dropped below 5%.

The School Board also differed with administrators on the issue of quarantining. 

Administrators recommended that if a school’s infection rate reaches 5%, students and staff members there who have close contact with someone who has the virus must quarantine. In cases where schools had a lower positivity rate, the district would have recommended but not required quarantining for close contact. 

Quarantining, however, has been an irritant for parents, students and School Board members, who noted that in most cases students sent home from school because they had close contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19 don’t contract the virus. 

The board decided a school’s infection rate must reach 10% before close contact quarantining is required.

“I have an issue with quarantining until we get to a really high level (of infections),” Miller said. “I think we have data to prove that school transmission is very low.”

Students and staff members who have symptoms of, or test positive for, Covid-19 must quarantine for 10 days regardless of infection rates in their schools. 

Supt. Dave Watkins told the board the district’s Covid-19 plan is intended to provide students, parents and staff members with a clear plan for the school year and give the district the flexibility to quickly transition between mitigation measures to combat the fast-spreading Delta variant.

“What we’ve learned from other districts is that if you don’t act quickly, it (the number of positive cases) can go from four to eight to 16 to 32 very quickly,” Watkins said. “It’s not necessarily days that are critical but hours,” which could mean the “difference between in-person, hybrid and online learning.

“Ultimately, we’re committed to providing a safe learning environment for students and staff and providing in-person learning five days a week.”

If the infection rate at a school reaches 10%, the district’s plan calls for additional mitigation measures, including possible online instruction.

The district’s plan derives its flexibility from having a series of progressive mitigation measures already approved by the board so administrators can react quickly without having to seek additional approvals. 

But board member Brian Stevens said he is not willing to give administrators “carte blanche” when it comes to dealing with the pandemic.

“I appreciate the ability to be flexible and nimble, but I’m concerned with granting complete authority (to administrators) to make changes on the fly,” he said. “I’m not comfortable with carte blanche authority.”

Stevens alluded to the criticism the board received last school year from parents who said school officials were out of touch with the challenges of online learning and slow to transition from a hybrid model under which most students attended in-person classes only two days a week to full-time, in-person instruction. 

“One of the biggest problems, essentially a failure, was the lack of transparency and communication between the administration and the board and the board and the community,” he said.

Board members considered adding a caveat to the Covid-19 plan requiring board approval before changes in mitigation strategies are made but ultimately decided to give that authority to administrators provided they consult the board’s Executive Committee first. 

The board’s vote on the plan came after several parents and a student urged members not to require masks, arguing they are ineffective and blaming them for causing hypoxia, bacterial infections and bad grades.

“There are plenty of studies that show they are Petri dishes,” one parent said. 

A Port High senior blamed masks for giving her multiple bacterial infections last year.

“I overall felt ill,” she said. “I noticed my grades were seriously declining.”

Robert Brooks, an outspoken critic of the district’s hybrid approach to instruction last school year, questioned the motivation for mask requirements.

“The virus simply doesn’t affect children in any significant way,” he said. “If it’s staff and faculty we’re attempting to protect, why can’t they be vaccinated?”

But another parent noted medical and educational experts from agencies that include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Academy of Pediatrics and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction recommend universal mask-wearing in school because face coverings slow the transmission of the virus and a significant number of students are unvaccinated.

“The medical experts and scientists who are researching this all recommend masks,” he said. 

Asked during an interview Tuesday if teachers support the district’s Covid-19 plan, Sandy Crain, president of the Port Washington-Saukville Education Association, the union that represents teachers, said, “We’ll use whatever mitigation strategies are in place to keep kids in school full time.

“I know we’ll have educators who wear masks all the time, every day and create a comfortable environment for students who choose to wear masks,” Crain, a middle school teacher, said. 

The only board member to vote against the plan was Stevens, who noted board members received their first look at the recommendation shortly before they were asked to vote on it and said, “I can’t vote for anything that can’t be proven effective.”