COVID Update - September 25, 2020
Greenback Family,
We are five weeks into school and we are happy to be in school and participating in activities. We know that can change. In fact, we had our second positive case for a student today. Parents of those students with close contact will get more in-depth communication. But, our students, staff, and parents have made a great effort to put us in the best position to be successful with our kids. Thank you!
It’s a marathon…not a sprint. Maybe, it’s more like a marathon with hurdles. My senior daughter runs hurdles…don’t tell her I wrote that. But, to that end, we know we have good people questioning how long we will continue with restrictions, especially requirements with masking. I do believe our staff and students’ overall willingness to do what is best for each other has helped us stay in school, maintain activities, and keep the district and community’s case numbers down.
We are going to begin posting our current operating zone on the homepage of our website. There will also be a link to a one-pager which hits the highlights on the protocols for our Green, Green +, Amber, Orange, and Red zones. Of course, we have more extensive protocols to cover the lunch room, activities, cleaning, etcetera, but the one-pager breaks down the major distinctions. With Governor Kelly’s Executive Order, we have effectively been in Amber and will continue in Amber next week. For those who attended the summer presentation on the zones, we added orange, which would be the level where we would enter a hybrid environment and reduce numbers at school. Obviously, our goal is to stay Amber or better (Green & Green +).
In conjunction with our health department, we developed gating criteria for our zones and we are posting that as a link with the current color. We included five criteria: 1) active cases connected to USD 382 (students or staff), 2) active cases in Pratt County, 3) number of students quarantined (this has most often been due to being a level 1 contact), 4) percentage of students absent for illness, and 5) the number of active cases per 100,000 population in a regional county block (we included Barber, Pratt, Kingman, Kiowa, Reno, and Sedgwick—Reno and Sedgwick because those are common transit points for our community). Feel free to call if you have questions.
A good news reminder…the USDA has extended its program that provided free lunches for all students—this is for schools that ran a summer lunch program. Yes, this applies to all students regardless of free/reduced/full-pay lunch status. The USDA anticipates this program will run through December 31st, when the funding is expected to expire. This requires no action on your part—student accounts will simply not be charged for the first lunch and/or breakfast. We posted a list of Frequently Asked Questions on our website and Facebook page for review.
The free lunch pricing began on Monday, September 14th. Again, this is expected to expire in December. Auto-debit fees for lunch/breakfast will be suspended during this time. If you have questions, please email heather.vanslyke@usd382.com.
Respectfully,
Tony Helfrich
Superintendent
Pratt Schools USD 382
