COVID causes Sheffield Schools to close for 2 days
At the very end of Monday night’s meeting of the school board, the superintendent said two district schools would have to close for two days.
At the close of the board’s business, shortly before 7 p.m., Warren County School District Superintendent Amy Stewart said she had just received information indicated an additional case of COVID-19 at the school.
That one case took the school over its state-assigned limit and required a two-day closure, Stewart said.
It was a surprise only in the timing.
“COVID… that is day-in, day-out for us,” she said earlier in the meeting. “We are close (to a targeted closure) on some of our schools. Some of our schools can only tolerate one case before closure.”
“Sheffield was very close to having to close last week,” Stewart said. “We went through the process of packing everybody up with their things.”
Students will attend virtually, as they did when the district moved away from in-person instruction for much of December and January.
District-wide there were “16 or 17 employees out” Monday due to the pandemic, mostly in quarantine, she said.
Board member Marcy Morgan said early in the meeting that the district was fortunate to be able to offer in-person education.
Stewart agreed.
Over two weeks, only about one in five schools nation-wide was offering in-person instruction.
“We are in that 19 to 22 percent,” Stewart said. “It’s taken about everything we’ve got. We’re going to keep doing what we can.”
Vaccines
District personnel who wanted it received their initial doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in mid-January.
At the time, vaccines were being offered to Phase 1B critical workers.
Second doses for district personnel will be given at the end of this week.
To help make sure those inoculations do not result in missed work time for teachers, they were scheduled for the end of this week. The district has an energy day – a day on which school is not scheduled, but can be held to make up for a snow day – set for Friday.
“They’re telling us that, with the Moderna vaccine, some folks are having a really sore arm, fever, chills, different flu-like symptoms,” Stewart said. “The hospital advised that it would be a good idea if we did it at the end of a week.”
The board, at Stewart’s request, formally changed the district calendar to designate another energy day as the first make-up day. That way, if schools were to be closed due to weather this week, Friday, Feb. 12 would still be a day off and any teachers who have significant reactions to the second dose will have a long weekend to recover.
Athletics
The district continues to offer its winter athletics seasons.
“Keeping winter sports going is proving to be as difficult as they said it would be,” Stewart said. “We’re going to keep on when we can, quarantine when we have to.”