Dear Upper Arlington families,
I hope your family has had a good week.
Today, I wanted to follow up with more information on how and when we might safely move to a five-day-a-week learning model, which has always been the goal of our Responsible Restart Plan. Click here to watch my video update, and check out the email below for other updates.
Five-day plan update
As you may recall from my update last week, our five-day-a-week plan would involve all of the health and safety protocols we have in place now. The primary difference would be having less than the 6 feet of physical distancing, which is considered “ideal” by the American Academy of Pediatrics and is the threshold for “exposure” and quarantine requirements from public health officials.
This week, we met with the local medical and public health experts on our Medical Advisory Team to review the latest Upper Arlington health data and discuss the parameters for moving to the five-day model. We’re looking at which indicators we should refer to, and what threshold those indicators would need to meet and for how long.
We are continuing this discussion with the advisory team, and we hope to be able to begin to share the details with you in next week’s update.
After we finalize those details, we will also be discussing what indicators and thresholds would send up a red flag and indicate that we need to consider a switch back into a different learning model if the data were to get worse.
Next week, we will also round out our team with the addition of a psychologist.
We will continue to focus on the health and safety of our students, staff and families, and our goal remains having our students back in our school buildings, five days a week, as soon as it is safe to do so.
COVID-19 data dashboard
We are encouraged to see the health data continuing to improve in our attendance area. You can find the updated data this week on our COVID-19 data dashboard.
COVID testing and student attendance
One of the COVID-19 questions our school nurses received several times this week was if a student can come to school while they or someone else in the household is awaiting test results. The answer is no - local health officials ask that if one member of a household is awaiting a COVID-19 test or test results, that all members of the household quarantine during that time.
If you have other school-related COVID-19 questions, please click here to view our FAQ and click here to view the in-person participation decision tree for students from public health officials. You can also reach out to COVID Nurse Coordinator Gina Rancitelli at [email protected].
That does it for this week’s update. I hope you and your family have a great weekend, and as always, go Bears!
Sincerely,
Paul Imhoff, Ed.D.
Superintendent, Upper Arlington Schools