And, We’re Back!

Last week shook us a bit and, although not unexpected, we all felt like it was a bit early. But, like I wrote last week, we learned much from it and, despite our general success, we can now move to improving our response and solidifying our practices. Middle School returned yesterday and settled back into class without losing a beat. Everything is, thus, generally on track.

Please help us on morning surveys. This is our main issue right now with entry and a critical component of our STOP plan. Daily morning completion of the survey is required and we would like to get our numbers down much lower in order to manage our systems in this regard. This is the reason for the 7:30 a.m. deadline each morning (except Wednesday and weekends). We need the time to check on any issues and we must have this in order to avoid checking children with you based on our lists. There are very few remaining application related issues. The vast majority of our challenge is the 100 -150 entries to the survey that come closer to 7:45 or 8:00. That overwhelms us and is critical to being prepared in the morning and being able to direct our time elsewhere.

To help with this, we are making some changes this coming weekend that we believe will help streamline your survey completion and minimize absences. Mainly, we will be moving to a four symptom focus:

• non-productive dry cough
• serious unusual tiredness
• loss of taste or smell
• serious muscle aches and chills

Please read the attached letter for details on the change and how this will help us focus on the most concerning symptoms and separate them from allergies and common cold symptoms. The link to the document below:

We will also be changing the time period AFTER symptoms and reducing the exclusion to 24 hours, with a requirement for re-test to re-enter. This will minimize absences without adding any risk to our identification as the letter explains.

Attached below is an addendum to our Data Processing declaration that you confirmed in PowerSchool at the beginning of the year. It clarifies the data exchange with EpiXpert and notifies you of the foundation for that exchange. We’ll also post this in PowerSchool and on our FAQ page for reference.

Thanks to those who have sent many messages of thanks and encouragement for our handling of last week’s exposure. You have all been wonderful partners in helping us to achieve our goal of responding to threats and minimizing the time out of school whenever a case emerges. You have all been wonderful.

And, finally, I’m going to change the schedule on Town Halls starting next week. I think we can relax a bit to every other week going forward in hopes of slowing down the communication incrementally. I’ll keep the morning Daily Updates for a bit longer. If we can get a few weeks under our belts without a new case, we’ll look to relax a bit further as we inch our way to the next crisis level. Looking forward to achieving that goal in short order.