001hello chris cooper superintendent of clearwater schools here to provide a brief update it's been a while a couple weeks since i've done one of these i also want you to know that um what i'm covering in the video will be included in a the message and an email message and with some additional resources and links i just wanted to take an opportunity to update you on some of the processes that we use to make decisions surrounding covet 19. the first thing i want to share is the data that we track each week sometimes more frequently but at each school level and the district level we track overall attendance compare that to what's typically average we look at the number of positive student and staff cases if we have those we also look at the number
002of student and students and staff at each building and at the district level that might be quarantined due to close contact with a positive individual and we also track students who are out because they have coveted like symptoms and so they may be out for as much as 10 days with those related symptoms even if it's not a coveted cova positive situation we also track the uh zip code the 67026 zip code data and we've done that since july 1st and we keep that longitudinally in a spreadsheet that i've shared in this email and we compute the percent positive rate on those tests for the last two weeks keep track of how many tests are done uh and how many positives there are so that's another piece of data the clearwater zip code is not
003exactly our school district but it is a nice uh additional piece of data that we can look at and we get that data from the sedgwick county covet 19 dashboard we do track obviously county-wide data we look at the number of new community disease cases how many per 100 thousand how many tests the percent positive lots of things there and in particularly the number of new hospitalizations due to covid i would say our numbers were doing pretty good until sometime last week they've started to turn a little bit as a zip code in the county hopefully we can get that turned back around and continue to have school we do have a group of individuals some community members and and staff members who look at this data regularly they're called the learning options committee they
004have met a few times and also i send them weekly updates of this data there's four local health experts or representatives on that team two school board members two building level administrators our school nurses and myself and so we need to try to make the best decisions we can so the process that we'll use is that that team will look at this data and decide if we need to consider additional health precautions or procedures in our schools and if that is the case they'll make a work with the administration team so they'll take the health recommendation and say this is what we need to do to keep everyone safe the admin team building principles and myself will look at those recommendations and then try to see how that fits into uh the way we can
005have school and and how we can accommodate those needs if there is a change recommended that that's a major change that recommendation then would go to this usd 264 school board who ultimately has the final decision about if we were to go remote hybrid hopefully won't come to that but we would have those two groups the administration and the learning options committee uh come to the board and share all the data that we have and and the decisions uh that went into making your recommendations the other thing i'd like to share is um our procedures for when we do have a positive case we have had some positive students we've had some positive staff we work with sedgwick county health that's the first phone call i make to determine what what we need to do
006next and typically that has been that we first of all we clean and disinfect any areas where that positive individual might have been in the school we uh find out through interviewing that person when they became symptomatic or when they tested positive usually both and then we go back 48 hours ahead of that time and we do contract contact tracing and we look for any individuals who would have been closer than six feet for more than 10 minutes in that bubble around that person who has now become positive we do that through a variety of measures i mentioned we interview the student we interview teachers we do have seating charts and all of our buildings have assigned seats we have seating plans for buses we also look at video footage all of our schools have
007several video cameras so we use video footage to see who might have been a close contact and when all those things pieces come together then we have a list of those individuals that need to be contacted as required we then provide those names and contact information to cedric sedgwick county health who and then in turn calls those parents of those individuals to go through the required procedures that they need to take in their home if that can't be done in a timely manner we as administrators and even our and our nurses will uh make those contacts in this email i also included our procedures if you have covered like symptoms i mentioned that we have some students or staff that are out based on symptoms that may or may not be covered and so like
008i said if you look at the accompanying email to this video there's a link to that reference guide and i really appreciate the great work that our nurses have done to put these many of these resources together there's another one in there that they've worked on called the uh symptoms and contact quick reference guide so if you have questions about um well my one child was a close contact can my other still go to school the answer is yes but several those questions could be answered uh in that quick reference guide also put a link to resources for the data that i mentioned so there's a link to the sedgwick county uh covet 19 dashboard that has the cases percent positive and you can drill down to our zip code data there using the tabs
009at the bottom also there's another link that has really my favorite data from the county and it's the coven 19 recovery and reopening metrics it goes into more detail and you can see the longitudinal longitudinal data there also included a link to the spreadsheet that i use to keep track of our zip code data i appreciate mr shipman helping build that early on and we've been able to maintain that uh there's also uh i'm just sharing as much as i can there's a link there that would give you access to see the number of policies we have we have had in our schools the number of people that have cumulatively been on quarantine whether that's for symptoms or close contact and then what it was at a point in time that's updated each week the
010last link that's included there is a link to some guidance this started as a document from the state department about how we can make decisions about what school might look like in the unfortunate event that our numbers don't go the way that we need them to so there's a lot of information there may generate some questions feel free to reach out to me at any time we are like most schools trying to figure this out as we go we're excited that we have completed a full month of school activities classes and learning has been going on so that's our goal is to continue as as safely as possible and have school but not at the risk of endangering people many other schools have suffered some setbacks whether that's school closure or quarantining classes and we
011have been able to learn from many of those districts i communicate with other districts regularly so again i just wanted to provide you an update i appreciate what you're doing to help us to have school i sincerely appreciate the staff and the students who have been overwhelmingly positive about some inconveniences that have made school different this year but they've just tackled it with a great attitude so that's all i have for today i hope to again meet many of you and someday we'll get to meet without masks on and i can hopefully remember names better at that time but don't hesitate to reach out call or email me if you have questions concerns thoughts that you think we could benefit from so take care and enjoy this great fall weather we're having and have a
012good day