(Spirit Lake)– The Spirit Lake School Board was updated during a work session Monday evening on precautions being put in place for COVID-19 with in-person classes scheduled to start August 24th. While there was some discussion over the debate on whether or not to require face masks, the board will hold off on a final decision until their meeting August 10th. However the district’s attorney informed the board of a federal statute known as free and appropriate education. He said mandating the use of face masks could put a district in violation of that statute.
The board discussed a number of other preparations and guidelines being put into place. Among them is frequent cleaning and sanitizing. Superintendent Dr. David Smith told the board a professional service will be brought in twice a week to do a thorough sanitizing of the buildings. Dr. Smith says another high priority will be on trying to keep students atleast six feet apart in classrooms. He says the district is even looking at some space in other facilities in the community to help out with that…
“We’ve evaluated probably six properties and we’re trying to find some space for maybe a couple of grade levels, you know, and we’re going to try to accommodate our elementary students and space them out where we might have our current pods that have four classrooms, we’re going to take the temporary walls out that are in between and probably have two classrooms; do the same thing in the middle school, and so you’ve got a little more space for classes. But that means we have to find some additional space. With all the construction we have going on, the Early Childhood Center and the middle school entrance and commons area, probably not the greatest timing for all that, but we’re going to make it work. Everybody’s committed to it and we know there’s some good space out there in the community that we can access and it’s going to be a great situation in the end for our kids.”
Dr. Smith says distancing students on buses will also be a priority with assigned seats. And to help further with that, he’s requesting parents provide transportation for students if at all possible…
“All of our bus routes are just jam packed so if there’s parents who can bring their kids to school and pick them up at the end of the day that certainly helps alleviate some of that load on the bus. And we might have to be a little bit more creative. Bus drivers are hard to find and so maybe this is also my free ad to try to find bus drivers, but anything we can do to just lessen the gathering of our students all in one place whether it’s a bus or in a classroom that’s what we’re going to try to do.”
And even though they’re continuing to get procedures put into place, Dr. Smith says things are going to remain fluid and will be subject to change based upon virus activity in the community. And he echoed comments of other school officials in the region caught up in a very difficult situation…
“You know we’ve got people that we absolutely respect that are saying I believe this and somebody else I really respect saying the absolute opposite. And so it’s a complicated situation, but there’s really a lot of good people. And in the end everybody wants to get it right for kids. We want to keep people as safe and healthy and educated and we want them to be back in school but people want to be back in school and they want to be back in the activities and they want to have the socialization and they want to learn and our teachers want to do the same thing. And so balancing all of it is a heck of a challenge for us. And nobody really knows exactly what the future looks like related to this. So it’s still kind of a build it on the fly concept but we’re up for the challenge, Steve.”
Protocol was also discussed at last (Mon.) evening’s meeting in the event a teacher or student tests positive for COVID-19 and the fact that whether the district would transition to online only would be based on matrix from local public health officials. The Governor has mandated school districts can apply to do that for 14 days only at a time.
