001good evening chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here on friday december 4th uh for a community update it's been a little over a week since you've heard from me so i have lots to share first of all i just like to say if you're appreciative of the fact that we're still on-site school in clearwater i'd love it if you could share that with our staff across the board if you know someone let them know if you do social media put it out there because um everyone has had to be very diligent and pull extra load uh to make that happen it's probably not more true any week other more true than this week at times this week we were very short on staff because of cover 19 quarantines or positive of staff 10 or 11
002teachers short one day i think our best day this week was we were six teachers short so that what that means is that everybody else in our system um pull pulls even harder and and i would say are uh glad to do that and uh that's that's nobody's fault other than this darn virus it's just a situation we're in and um we have a substitute teacher shortage so if you'd like to sub give our district office a call we'll get you set up but anyway people have really came together to make sure that we can continue to provide on-site education for our students here in clearwater and if you have a way to show anybody that works in our system some appreciation i think that would be received very well a couple of other just
003little detail details i wanted to update some folks on our visitors policy we're going to have pretty strict visitors policy we want to maintain the most controlled environment that we can and so unless absolutely necessary there won't be anybody other than students and staff in our buildings you should have received email if you're a parent of a student that free lunches through the federal lunch program are continuing through the end of the school year not just the end of the calendar year so lunches will be free to students all year long this year um if you have a balance of more than 20 and you'd like a refund let the school offices know if you'd like that just to roll over to next year you don't have to do anything it will that will happen
004automatically um obviously most people have heard about the acacia the activities association's no spectator guidelines so tonight we're playing high school basketball over bell playing with no spectators it's kind of kind of a strange environment today the acacia appeals board did approve sending that back to the executive board for more consideration so i i'm sure there'll be more information about that and you can see that most likely on the evening news we will do our best to keep you updated i appreciate our administrators working for you in that way you may also hear soon or you may have heard that the cdc has changed its quarantine guidelines until those are adopted by sedgwick county we're still under the old quarantine guidelines which are 14 days i anticipate that we will we will see a change
005to a line in our county with cdc which would be great basically it's a 10 day quarantine instead of 14 some other things to it um and currently if we had a 10 day quarantine we would have about uh 80 more kids in school today than we had because they would be off quarantine already the other thing you may hear from the kansas department of health and environment is they're going to be changing their recommendations for elementary kids and um that's basically that the science is showing that elementary students aren't as at as high a risk to catch the virus they're at a lower risk to have severe symptoms and they're at a lower risk to transmit the virus to others so because of that kdhe is going to recommend that if we can staff
006our elementary buildings that we continue to keep kids on site which has been our decision here in clearwater already so you may be hearing about that it's going to give you just an update on our current coveted numbers this has been our highest week thanksgiving break was not good to us even over break we kept adding students and staff every day so currently we are at our highest we have 12 students who are covered out for coded positive at this time it's a little over one percent of our total student population we do have 138 students that were out today because of quarantine and again a large part of that's contact outside of school in the home because of the community spread that we've had some of that is from contacts in school obviously our
007staff we currently have four staff who are covered positive and we have 13 staff who are out for coveted reasons so again back to the shortage that's a that's a big chunk of it um as we are covering for people who are out on quarantine or out for coping positive reasons uh we did have some grade levels hit harder uh the last week or two than others um eighth grade and fourth grade particularly seemed hit fairly hard uh cims did have at one point over 80 students out this week and and that provides extra challenges for the staff that's that is on site who's already covering for extra extra classes for teachers that are gone but then we they have the added challenge of dealing with many kids remotely and and also having kids on
008site so in many aspects this has been one of our toughest weeks and i'm so proud of the staff for the efforts that they have made and i was at the cims building a lot this week and people walk in the office and saying is there anything i can do to help so very appreciative of that personally and again if you could show our folks that that would be great so not a lot of new information not a lot of changes from us but we'll continue to press forward as again i said you'll you'll be hearing about the acacia appeals process for allowing spectators at events and i anticipate that we'll see some changes in our quarantine requirements fairly quickly um hopefully as soon as next week sometime and uh we are uh are hard
009at the work to provide the best environment for kids that we can this year so with that take care be safe please do all you can to mitigate the spread of coping 19 in our community so we can continue to keep kids in our buildings and having school every day thanks you