Brian Hagberg
RUSSELL, Pa. – The Warren County School District took another step towards a return to normal when the school board approved an updated Health and Safety Plan during its regular meeting Monday.
With COVID cases on a sharp decline across the county and within the WCSD, the district eliminated some of the modifications for physical distancing inside school buildings and modified the parameters for denied entry.
The board passed the updated plan with a 7-2 vote, Arthur Stewart and Joe Colosimo voted against it after a motion to roll back denied entry further failed.
“Our COVID numbers are dropping significantly, and we are now ready for the first steps of removing some of the mitigation strategies we have been utilizing,” WCSD Superintendent Amy Stewart said in an email to Your Daily Local.
There are five items related to physical distancing, Amy Stewart said, that can begin implementation this week:
- Eliminating the mandatory screening requirement for employees
- Eliminating one-way hallway and stairway patterns
- Allowing two or three homerooms to have recess together
- Allowing teachers to arrange classrooms with their desired furniture/layout
- Returning elementary carpets to classrooms
“I can tell you that the high school principals are ready to have those stairwells be two-way, they can’t wait to have that happen again it’s on the top of their list,” Amy Stewart told the school board Monday. “The elementary folks are excited to get carpets back in those classrooms and get the things that make things a little bit more enjoyable, natural interactions with kids.”
For the second time in as many months, the district also modified what close contacts would be denied entry to school buildings. On Monday, the modification was moved to only students who are COVID-positive, symptomatic, and those who are deemed close contact and unwilling or unable to wear a mask for five days will be denied entry.
Arthur Stewart asked for a modified motion that would deny entry to only those students who must be denied entry by law.
“Right now we’re going above and beyond the law,” Arthur Stewart said. “And you can see from the reports that we get, how many students are not able to come to school. And I think it’s time that we let our students come to school where we have a choice to do so and the law tells us when they can’t come to school. I think we should respect that law. I think we should stop at the end of that law.”
Board President Paul Mangione pointed out that in the latest report, only nine students had been denied entry.
“If it’s down to nine students doesn’t that tell us it’s time to quit?” Arthur Stewart responded. “The burden that goes along with denying entry. It’s taking a great deal of our staff’s time and we’re just exhausted from dealing with all this COVID stuff and anything that we can do to relieve our staff’s burden. We should do so.”
By taking a gradual step-down approach, Amy Stewart said, the district is able to stay within the comfort level of a majority of its 600 staff and 4,000 students.
“We didn’t get here in five minutes, we’re not going to get out of this in five minutes,” Amy Stewart said. “Not everybody is going to be comfortable to just pull the rug out from under all of this all at one time. The last thing I want to do is have you know 10 percent of our staff that now feel so anxious about being at school that they can’t come or they’re not willing to.”
Arthur Stewart said he wanted to discuss moving to only denying entry to students based on the letter of the law so that the board “remove ourselves from being again the target of a lawsuit for anybody who wants to target us because we’re keeping students out of school when the law doesn’t require them to be kept out of school.”
The district was successfully sued by a group of parents and students in October after the board approved a pair of policies that did not meet state and federal masking guidelines.
One thing Amy Stewart stressed about all of these restriction rollbacks is to keep open communication with parents and understand there is still a wide spectrum of emotion surrounding COVID.
“This whole thing, from March of 2020 until now, we have folks that are over it, and they’ve been over it for a really long time,” Amy Stewart said. “We have folks that are concerned and have a lot of anxiety about it.”
