School District to dial back Covid-19 rules

The Grafton School Board agreed to loosen Covid restrictions and notifications as the school district continues to experience a drop in positive cases.

Following a recommendation from district staff, the School Board voted to make four changes to its Covid policy.

The district will no longer send out daily Covid notifications and will instead track information internally. It also will not be sending notifications when students have a close Covid contact with another student in class.

The School Board also decided to discontinue its 6% mitigation factor, which required masking, lunchroom procedures and breaking students into cohorts when more than 6% of students have active cases at a school.

The fourth change is that lab verified or at-home negative Covid tests will now allow symptomatic students to return to school sooner than five days after showing symptoms.

Quarantining, symptom monitoring and all other procedures in the district’s plan will remain the same.

Laura Stuatz, Director of Pupil Services, presented the recommendations to the school board on Feb. 21.

She said the district has its lowest case rate since July and that it has the lowest rate in the county. At the time of the presentation, there were no positive cases in the district.

“We are moving in the right direction,” she said.

Cases have decreased greatly from spikes in January. At Grafton High School there were 54 confirmed cases in January and 13 in February. John Long Middle School, had 33 cases in January and 13 in February.

“In January, we really hit that high but we’ve come down substantially,” Stuatz said.

Stuatz said while daily Covid notifications will no longer be sent, information will continue to be updated on the district website.

“If people want to know how many positive cases we have, they will still be able to see that,” she said.

In regards to notifications for close contacts in classrooms, she said, testing processing times often cause the notification to be sent when it is too late.

“So many times when we get information that a child is sick with Covid, there is a delay in getting that information out to families, so it’s not very useful,” she said.

District Supt. Jeff Nelson noted that the more emails the district sends to families, the less they are likely to be viewed. He added that discontinuing notifications would also free up staff time and resources.