The Polk County School Superintendents met last week with Polk County Public Health Director Sarah Reese to discuss the new CDC recommendations and how to move forward with the beginning of the school year. Crookston Public Schools will recommend wearing masks at the start of the school year but not mandating them.
A lot can change from now until the beginning of the school year with COVID-19, but this is the route Crookston will head for the time being. They will be releasing a notice sometime next week with more details.
Crookston Public Schools Superintendent Jeremy Olson talked about the meeting with Reese and the information they received. “All the Polk County Superintendents try to get together routinely with Polk County Public Health,” said Olson. “We just want to make sure we’re all on the same page with what’s happening in our county from a health perspective and trying to match our responses as a district.”
Olson also discussed the decision to move forward without a mask mandate for the time being. “As a result of that meeting, we were able to receive an update from Polk County Health about what’s going on in our district,” said Olson. “At this point, we’re well situated, but we also discussed our mitigation strategies and how it affects our residents and students at this point. At this point, we are not mandating masks but rather recommending because that is what the CDC is doing; however, if parents want to send their kid to school with a mask, we will encourage that.”
Olson didn’t go into specifics about a certain threshold that would need to be met to mandate masks, and at this time, the district is going to take things week by week. There is not much information about the new variant of COVID-19, and if things get worse, more mitigation strategies will be deployed and vice versa if things get better.
At this point, the district has local control and will decide what decision they make. Olson said because of this; they will continue to look at things on a local scale to make decisions. “Because we have local control right now, we will be looking at local factors while determining what actions should be taken,” said Olson. “The first strategy I would ask people to use to keep everyone safe and avoid wearing masks would be for everyone who is twelve and older to get vaccinated. That is the first and foremost preventative measure we can take at this time.”
The fewer restrictions that need to be applied throughout the year will allow for sports to continue to move forward and a more normal school year for students.
For all the kids who are not eligible to get vaccinated due to age, the school is looking at a couple of potential options to keep them as safe as possible. “We have a couple of options we’re looking into for ways to keep students safe and will be releasing all that information sometime next week,” said Olson. “The biggest question I get at this point is “are we going to have to wear masks?” and at this point, the answer is no when it comes to a mandate.”
As mentioned, Olson says the information will be released in the coming weeks; however, he offered a few other suggestions to parents if they want to stay up to date. “The Minnesota Department of Health has some great resources and statistics you can look at and stay up to date with on their website,” said Olson. “We are not going to have a set rate in which we make changes; this is going to be something that we look at within our community and make decisions as we go after consulting with Polk County Public Health.”
Olson also noted that if transmission rates change over the coming days/weeks, things can change, but no mask mandate will be in place for the start of the 2021-2022 school year.
