(Spirit Lake)– The Spirit Lake School Board Monday evening officially adopted protocol to reopen schools on a face-to-face basis during the COVID-19 pandemic. Superintendent Dr. David Smith says the policy requires face masks be worn by students in certain situations with exceptions for students with disabilities or special needs…
“The decision’s been made to require masks on buses and in the hallways and recommend them in the classroom when you’re moving around, but our goal is to have every student when they’re seated in the classroom be six feet apart. I think all of our information that we received is really, really strong on social distancing is probably the best deterrent to what we’re trying to Covid.”
To accomplish that, Dr. Smith says they’re looking at relocating several grade levels, including one to a location completely off site of the district’s facilities…
“We’re likely to move the fourth grade into the middle school building and from there we would move on grade level to the high school, probably eighth grade we would move into the high school, probably utilizing the space we’re in right now, and then seventh grade will likely go to an off site, off campus location.”
Dr. Smith says one of their main goals is not to have just one positive test for the virus cause a total upheaval…
“I mean if that’s the case why even try? But like we want to have school, we want to get back to school. We want to maintain school. If there’s one case we don’t want to have to shut down. We want to do everything we possibly can to keep people spaced, so if it comes back to contact tracing that we, for the most part, they’ve been outside of that six foot mark for most of the time and we hope we can continue. We don’t want a massive outbreak. I mean we just have to do everything possible to just keep people as safe as we can and we’re going to have to make adjustments on the fly. Not everything is going to be the same a month or two months down the road and we have to be flexible. We have to identify things quickly and we have to act immediately.”
The Spirit Lake School Board also Monday adopted an illness protocol for staff and students. You can see that by clicking here.
The first day of school for the roughly 1,300 students in the Spirit Lake School District is August 24th.
