001clearwater schools wanted to give you a brief update we had a special board meeting last night wednesday november 18th and would like to review some things that uh transpired there first of all the board of education received reports from members of our learning options committee this committee is made up of some local health experts in the area school nurses and some administrators they also received data concerning our current situation of student and staff positive covert and quarantine coveted folks and reviewed all the absence detail that was provided to them they also had discussion about a letter from the kansas code work group for kids which i will attach attached to this notification so you can review that as well after all that the board reached consensus on several items first of all the current spread
002of cova 19 in our community is of great concern to the board of education our schools do have a high standard of mitigation procedures contact tracing not allowing ill students or staff to continue to attend and we appreciate parents partnership in helping us with this with the mitigation procedures in place schools have proven to be one of the safest places in our community to prevent the spread of covet 19. also the board reached consensus that learning remotely in neighboring schools and even in our schools leading to a high level of academic failure in lots of communities and it's not likely to reduce the spread of coba 19 in our community bottom line is in-person school is not the cause of the rapid spread of cobia lack of mitigation practices and behavior in our community are
003the reasons for the spread so at this time in-person schooling will continue in clearwater schools pre-k through 12th grades as long as buildings can be appropriately staffed if staffing does become an issue our focus will be on the pre-k six and we may have to go remote 912 or 712 to free up resources to keep our pre-k through six kids on site which says frees up substitute teachers aids some other things that we might be able to move that way at this time winter activities will continue the spec staters will be very limited will be limited to two spectators per participant in the activity and that will be across the board any activities in our school if a school happens to be in remote learning so the middle school or high school there will be
004no spectators allowed at our activities at that time strict mitigation practices such as mask wearing will be required at all activities or spectators will be required to leave we will also continue to seek the guidance and direction of the sedgwick county health department and follow their direction one thing i'd like to say is things may change quickly they current certainly have throughout the year we will continue to try to find adaptive solutions that are most appropriate at that time i did want to review our data at this time so we have about 1120 students in our district currently four of those students are reported positive coven 19. we have of those 1120 students that are out because of being a close contact in our buildings totally we have 76 students that are currently as of
005uh three o'clock today uh out for various reasons related to covet that might be their close contact at school one of those 19 might be that they're not feeling well they have symptoms and so they're they're out on quarantine um but the vast majority are because they've been a close contact outside of our school system more concern is our staff we currently have six staff out of 200 that are covered 19 positive we have 11 staff that are out for uh total coveted reasons so five in addition to those six positives so i would just ask that as we go into this thanksgiving break a couple of things one thing if you appreciate clearwater schools being on site with our students please thank a teacher or staff member because they have continued to go above
006and beyond when we can't find enough substitutes for the classroom other teachers pick up that slack and they've continued to do that and it is very exhausting for them so if you appreciate what they've done i just ask you to take a few minutes write them an email send them a text if you know them stop by well we can't do in-person stuff so uh we want to reduce the spread but somehow let your appreciation be known for our staff the board wants to recognize the efforts of not only staff but also students as they have provided proven they can do what it takes to stay in school we'd ask our community to do the same and i know thanksgiving is a great holiday and unfortunately i've had to change my personal plans i'm not
007going to tell anybody what to do but i just asked that as you go out and about over thanksgiving break that you think about the kids of our in our community and doing whatever it is that we can do to keep our cases down to keep our quarantines down and allow us to continue having school at clearwater schools as always reach out to me if you'd like to with any questions comments or concerns uh this video is going to have an accompanying statement and again the the letter from the kansas code workgroup for kids things may change quickly i hope we can continue to to keep a handle on the number of positive cases in our district if not we will as i said try to find adaptive solutions at that time and do what
008it takes to keep everyone safe that's all i have for today have a great weekend tomorrow's friday and i hope everyone can enjoy their thanksgiving take care you