Mount Vernon’s school district (MVCSD) will have a new COVID policy in January.
The current PK-6 mask mandate will expire Dec. 31, 60 days after vaccinations became available for students under the age of 12. The school board, after discussion at its Dec. 13 meeting about what to do next, decided to not put a new blanket mandate in place after the current one expires, and only require masks under certain COVID-19 infection rates per building.
Current situationCases of COVID-19 are “pretty much in check” in Mount Vernon’s school district and are “dramatically lower than a month ago,” said Superintendent Greg Batenhorst. As of Dec. 10, the district had had a total of only 146 COVID cases in the three and a half months of meeting in-person so far this school year.
In addition, the number of COVID cases in the school district recently is very low. The district had only three positive COVID cases on Dec. 10, down two from the previous week and down 24 from Oct. 22, which was in the week with the highest number of cases in the district so far this school year.
The district’s absentee rate this year has also been very low. The rate in the latest week reported, Dec. 6-10, ranged from 2.78 percent to 3.97 percent. Those percentages are down substantially from the week with the highest absentee rates this school year, Oct. 18-22. That week had absentee rates of 3.89 percent to 6.22 percent.
Even so, all the district’s absentee rates are substantially below 10 percent, the rate at which Iowa schools can receive a state waiver from having to meet in person. Iowa schools must also have a positive coronavirus test rate of at least 15 percent in their county before they can receive a state waiver.
New policyAfter discussion of the current situation in the school district, the school board voted unanimously in favor of ending the current mandate as of Dec. 31 and replacing it with COVID protocols that would only go into effect for a limited time if conditions with COVID-19 and other student illnesses worsened enough to support returning to temporarily wearing masks in a specific building.
So when students come back to school on Jan. 3, no mask mandate will be in place in school.
No such mandate will occur unless a building experiences both high levels of COVID-19 and high levels of absences at the same time for three consecutive school days. Such a mandate would be temporary until the absence numbers went down and would apply only to the school building the outbreak occurred in.
Wearing masks will therefore generally be optional in the school buildings, and PK-6 students will no longer be required to wear masks all the time they’re in school.
However, the district still recommends mask wearing for all students, staff, and visitors in all three school buildings beginning Jan. 3, especially for those who aren’t vaccinated.
Masks will also still be required for all students riding on any school transportation, per federal guidelines. No exemptions are allowed to this guideline.
In addition, the district is still discussing how to address mask wearing in the preschool classrooms, since most preschool students are not yet eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. The district will send a separate communication to the parents of preschool students once that decision has been made.
Students will be required to wear masks in a specific school building only if and when 2 percent of the students in the building test positive for COVID-19 for three consecutive school days and 8 percent of the students in that building are absent due to illness for the same three straight school days.
If that occurs, all the students in that building would need to wear masks until the absence numbers in the building dropped to an acceptable level. The mandate would then stay in place until the nurses and Batenhorst reached the conclusion that the mandate could safely be dropped.
Students in other buildings would not have to wear masks at the same time unless their numbers met the same criteria.
Thus one building might put a short term mandate in place, while the others would not be required to do so.
Batenhorst said, though, that he doesn’t expect both of those criteria to be met at the same time unless COVID-19 case numbers spike a lot. None of the buildings has yet met the two percent/eight percent threshold this year.
“Unless a major spike in COVID-19 case numbers is experienced, we are confident that we will likely not hit the two percent/eight percent threshold, and thus mask wearing will remain optional for students and staff,” he said.
The school administration currently thinks that such a mandate would remain in place until the building affected had several days of going below the 2 percent/8 percent threshold. The district is confident that any such mandate would be for a brief period of time, said Batenhorst.