001hello chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here with another brief update there are lots of things going on at the state and a county level with health mandates and so i want to give you a brief update about where we are as a district first of all i would say um we're not gonna we are not making a need your quick reaction we want to make a good decision so there's no immediate changes as of tomorrow or probably even as early as next week it is a complicated decision and we again want to make sure that we're making a good long-term decision one of the things that we did early on was i have an agreement with the teachers association and the school board that we wanted these decisions about mitigation strategies and how to
002have school left in the hands of the health experts so we agreed to not be less restrictive than the county or health order at the time and it's somewhat confusing because the legislator is working to strip the governor of any authority but my interpretation is that we are still under the governor's order 2059 until next wednesday march 35th 31st that would say that we would require mask and basically do all the things we've been doing the other thing about the 31st is that's unique is that we have provided opportunity for our staff to receive vaccines and that is the day that 10 days after the second dose where the producer of that vaccine would say that's at its effectiveness level that it needs to be so again i don't know that we'll have changes after
003the 31st but i don't feel like there will be any changes in place prior to that point so the other thing that we have in our district is we have a group of local health experts that work in our area hospitals and deal with this on the front lines and i'm going to ask that group to reconvene they're called the learning options committee that we've used several times this year but ask them to reconvene and give us advice as how we move forward and still have school a complicating factor in all this are the quarantine guidelines so uh we're currently under quarantine guidelines that if if somebody's covered positive but everybody's wearing a mask even the close contacts do not have to quarantine if we were to remove the mask from our district then if
004we did have a do have a positive case we would have to co quarantine all the students and staff that were close contacts for at least 10 days i guess it could be eight if there was a negative test as well but so it's it's very very uh complicated and again um we want to uh get the best decision we can made we also feel like the things we put in place have been effective so one that one last thing i would ask is that um as we have all year throughout this process that we communicate uh open and honestly and uh that we stick together stay together that we don't let this as time as hopefully we're coming out of this pandemic returning to a life of normal that we all desire so bad
005that we don't let these this transition divide us anyway because i've seen communities that have been divided and i'm i'm so proud of the way clearwater community has came together so let's just continue to focus on that we will work together uh to hear all all voices and also to make the best decision we can for all of our kids each day so that's all i have for today it's mr cooper signing off take care and have a great evening