001hello chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here i want to give you a quick update it's been a while almost three weeks since i've sent out a community update so let you know a little bit about what's been going on unfortunately still talking about covid so we'll give a quick covet update i hope to incorporate a lot of other things in these updates in the future but since the last time i provided an update there was a point where we did have three positive students which caused about another 30 students to be quarantined because of close contact i'm happy to report that all of those students that were close contacts at school and three positive students are back in school without further incident so that is great news that the contact racing and the quarantine
002seem to to contain that at least in our school district we do have some students that are on quarantine 10 students at this time which is less than one percent of our student population on quarantine for being close contacts outside of school or having some symptoms that are like covered like so they're on quarantine as of right now we do have zero positive students which is great news we have a of three staff members that are out at this time because of covert related quarantine or symptoms i would mention that since the last update we have added a covert 19 information section to our webpage if you go to our main web page scroll down right below the big uh picture section on the left hand side there's there are some links to data local
003data and the county data that we use so currently our attendance has been great this week over 95 attendance at all of our school buildings so that's great news i would uh share i would like you to take a look at some time some of the county data and zip code data unfortunately that's not been trending as well if you watch the news or anything like that our county data has been trending the wrong direction with percent positive cases going up number of cases going up uh hospitalizations there's some interesting data there that there even the county's still trying to walk through our zip code which is just the clearwater 67026 zip code the last several weeks has not been where we would like to see it we've had six or seven cases for four
004weeks and then last week was three additional cases so it is here we are dealing with it having to deal with it just ask that everybody would do their part do whatever you can to help us to keep having school we you should have if your parents have received a parent survey we'd ask that you take a few minutes to fill that out give us feedback we do utilize those surveys and trying to look at how we can continually improve as i mentioned earlier trying to talk about things not not coveted we still do want to push forward and improve our processes and instruction and curriculum for every student as as we progress through this year one of the things that we have done is uh we've screened all students which we do each year
005and reading and math k-8 and as expected we saw some slide from last spring not not getting to finish the school year but really not too bad we're going to get kids through this we can do the things that we need to do to to get them back on track as long as we can continue to have school and have that engagement from from students and parents the other exciting thing you know we've continued to have athletics talk to somebody yesterday who said if you'd have told them we were going to play every middle school football and volleyball game this year before we started they'd have they would have said no that's not possible but so we have had some some great accomplishments we're continuing to play those fall sports at the high school at
006the middle school level we have switched to winter sports practice last night attended a great vocal music concert at the high school strangest vocal music concert probably anybody's been to with kids wearing masks and um lots of different things um than we would typically see but we got to have it and we got to have uh spectators there i would say i really appreciate the folks that came in uh complying with our requirements that that are in place that we have to adhere to of mass and distancing so i just want to say thanks for that and really uh overall just want to encourage our community to help us keep going to school this is week eight next week we'll end the first quarter of school we're excited about that kids want to be in
007school teachers want to be in school and the longer we can stay on site the better there was one thing i didn't want to mention that i forgot about the uh you might have seen a new county health order the changes that that made that had to do with schools would have been our pre-k and kindergarten students and the county order um are not required to wear mass in school and then there was a clarification about face shield being face covering we do have an agreement with our teachers it's called a memorandum of understanding standing that the board and the teachers union entered into and agreed to that says that clearwater school district will not be less restrictive than the county and state orders in place of the time so we are currently still under
008the governor's order 2059 which does say all people uh entering our schools have to be masked i do anticipate that very soon we'll hear another order um at the state level that may change that i would anticipate that um so at this time we're we're not making any changes because we're still under that statewide order but again back to asking each individual to do what we can to help mitigate the spread of this and keep kids in school you know i'm new to this community been very welcomed but one of the first things i noticed was the pride and the show of pride in the community and in our schools it's it's very very evident so let's as individuals take that pride and put it into giving our best effort to do what we can
009do to keep kids in school and our kids have done an outstanding job i mean we we don't like it but they're wearing masks our teachers are wearing masks we're doing this seven hours a day so if our kids can do it let's be inconvenienced as adults and do everything we can to to stop the spread of cobin i have no guarantee that if we do all these things it will still be able to stay in school but we want to know we've given it our best effort so i just have a plea that we we can get a hold of these numbers as we go into this colder weather that we continue to do everything we can to help keep kids in school that's all i have for today uh stop by give me
010a call and i look forward to as i always say meeting many of you and someday shaking hands and getting to see your whole face and and learning your names and more about you and this wonderful clearwater community thanks