(Spirit Lake)– Dr. David Smith, Superintendent of the Spirit Lake Community Schools, says today’s (Tues.) announcement from the Iowa Department of Public Health pertaining to new quarantine guidelines for schools won’t have much of an impact on the district’s COVID-19 protocols already in place…
“We’re still keeping our six feet social distancing in place and we’re very pleased with the results of that. What this does, Steve, is it allows a little bit more flexibility on buses where we have students sitting together within six feet for more than 15 minutes. If two students are both wearing a mask and one tests positive for covid that would mean now the other student would not have to quarantine. So that offers some additional flexibility. I’m assuming there’s some pretty good research behind that, so we like that. I think that also applies to small groups, our student section, places like that. I think it allows us a little bit more flexibility that way to have students together for longer periods of time and still keep them safe according to what was announced today.”
Dr. Smith also provided an update on the district’s numbers and where they stood as of Noon today (Tues.)…
“You know if you look at our district testing we’ve had 60 total tests taken and we only had eight positive and only four active at this time and eight positive is like .6 percent of our district population of 1,300 students. To me that’s exceptional and that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods by any means, but that’s a really good statistic for us. Our staff, we’ve had five positive tests this year, we have zero active so everybody’s back in the classroom and healthy and we’re checking people along the way and as far as quarantine I think we’re at 37 active quarantine cases, that’s like 2.8 percent. The interesting fact is we track everything and we have one classroom related quarantine and we have ten related to activities, so 11 in the school setting but the rest of these active cases were found out to be outside of the actual school and so that makes us feel good that we’re doing a pretty good job, the adults are being responsible. By no means are we perfect and we’re constantly trying to make our system better and we’re constantly trying to remind our entire district to be on top of this and it’s really important. I’m sure things will change along the way but for right now I’m just very pleased with what everybody’s doing and how we’re handling the situation and again, not out of the woods but it’s a good start to the year.”
You can view the Spirit Lake Community School District’s update by clicking here.
