Superintendent Eric Wright announced updates to the Hays Consolidated Independent School District Covid-19 protocol at the board of trustees meeting Aug. 30 that includes additional staff and readily available masks on all campuses.
Expanding on an announcement from last week, some of the additional staff will go toward conducting contact tracing and generating information to update Hays CISD’s case count daily, as opposed to weekly as it had been.
“We are going to have a cut-off each day so that we can post those so that people can see those numbers... then we will roll forward anything that occurs after the deadline,” Wright said.
Wright also solidified thresholds that will determine when a classroom will be closed—at three or more positive cases—and an entire campus closure—at 10% or more students and staff combined. The numbers will be calculated Monday through Friday of each given week.
In an effort to keep parents even more informed, letters will be sent out that specify which classroom had a positive case.
Wright also mentioned that masks for children and adults have been purchased and will be available in all classrooms district wide, and they are attempting to secure air purifiers for all nurse’s stations to ensure clean and disinfected air. Teachers can also request plexiglass partitions for their classrooms that were more utilized last year.
Outside of the classroom, plans are being made to create seating charts for the school busses that will group together students who chose to wear masks and those who don’t to keep them in their respective pods.
However, while busses were cleaned between groups of elementary, middle and high school students being picked up and dropped off, now the busses are only cleaned after all students have been dropped off at school in the morning and at home in the afternoon.
For now, they’re going to encourage masks and vaccines for all that are eligible and will try to host vaccine clinics if and when the vaccine is approved for individuals younger than 16.
“We are definitely encouraging mask wearing for our principals and vice principals,” Wright said. “We believe that they will lead by example and others will follow.”
