Spiking quarantine numbers have led the Marysville Board of Education to change course on its masking policy, put in place less than a month ago.
The board voted Thursday night to enact mandatory masking in all district buildings through Oct. 25.
According to Superintendent Diane Allen, the district was simply experiencing too many seemingly healthy children being forced to stay home because of Ohio Department of Health (ODH) quarantine guidelines.
“We are definitely in a different place than our worst point of last school year,” Allen told the board of education at a meeting Thursday night.
At its worst point of the 2020-21 school year, the district had 13 active cases of COVID and 245 children out of school because of quarantine guidelines. For this school year, which is only a few weeks old, there was a week with 32 active cases and 358 students home from school on quarantine.
According to Allen, of the 418 students who have been sent home because of quarantine regulations, 323 could have remained in school if they had been masked.
ODH guidelines mandate that anyone within 6 feet of a confirmed positive COVID case for more than 15 minutes must be quarantine at home if unmasked. If masked, anyone within 3 to 6 feet of the patient can stay in school under modified quarantine, which involves wearing a mask. Anyone within 3 feet of a confirmed individual must still be sent home, regardless of masks.
Allen said her recommendation to the board to implement a mask mandate grew from the fact that 77% of the district’s home quarantines could have been avoided if masks were used.
“It’s to a point where we need kids in school,” Allen said.
Allen said the primary goal for this school year was to keep children in classrooms five days a week. The rash of quarantines was not allowing that to happen, she said.
“It (remaining unmasked) seems counterproductive to that goal,” Allen said.
The district began the school year with a plan that if more than 6% of a building’s population was impacted by COVID, either by a positive case or quarantine, the facility would see a mandatory two-week masking period. When school started in late August, Bunsold Middle School and Edgewood Elementary saw almost immediate spikes in impact.
Both schools were on mask mandates beginning this week, with Bunsold being the epicenter of district cases with 19 cases and more than 100 quarantines as of this morning.
“Bunsold has shown how fast it can multiply,” Allen said.
But Allen noted that those two buildings weren’t isolated in their issues. While Edgewood quickly saw an entire kindergarten class sent home because of a COVID issue, Northwood and Mill Valley elementaries experienced similar whole-class issues.
While the district enacted the mask mandate, it appears to be backing off the idea of holding to a hybrid learning trigger. Allen told the board Thursday that the 10% impact limit for engaging hybrid learning may not be appropriate as officials continue to monitor the problem.
Allen told the board that virus spread within the buildings is one area that is vastly different than last year, when students were in a hybrid learning model early in the year and were masked upon their return to full-time instruction. This year, 19 positive COVID cases within the schools have been directly linked to close contact within the buildings.
“We did not have any students who had turned positive (last year),” Allen said.
The district continues to offer a virtual academy for families who are not comfortable with the risks of in person learning. Currently, about 100 students are taking that route.
The district is also now offering a blended academy for students in grades K-5 which involves primarily virtual instruction with occasional meetings with teachers outside of the school setting. Thirty-eight students are currently using that option.
Allen said the district will continue to monitor COVID numbers within the district but the mask mandate will stay in place through late October. Exemption forms for medical or religious reasons have been emailed to parents and are available on the district website.
The superintendent said she knows wearing masks is not ideal for the educational environment, especially for young literacy students trying to learn to speak by watching and mimicking teachers.
“Is it ideal – no,” Allen said. “But neither is 500 students being sent home and disconnected.”