The Greenbrier County Board of Education celebrated and considered reducing COVID-19 mitigation strategies during their Tuesday, November 9, meeting.
The board approved the COVID-19 back to school plan on August 18, mandating mask wearing and outlining the ways the school system would keep the virus from spreading among the ample unvaccinated students. Lead School Nurse Paula McCoy explained this plan has, so far, worked.
“I want to commend you on the mitigation plan because I’m going to give you some statistics that will just illustrate that our plan is working,” said McCoy. “I started in late September posting on our website. … The week of September 13, we had two schools with greater than 8 percent of students and staff on quarantine or isolation [and] three schools with over 6 percent, and three schools over 3 percent. … This week, we have two schools with over 3 percent of students and staff on quarantine and all of the others are under 3 percent. Congratulations, it is working.”
This also came with a warning, however.
“Today on the county COVID Task Force call, Dr. Bridgett Morrison, our county health officer, did give a warning that rates are trending in a bad direction. … She encouraged vaccines to encourage masking.”
McCoy noted the policy could also be adjusted in several ways. The first was reducing the policy decisions down from a daily task to something that’s done once a week on Friday.
“Going day by day creates a lot of complexities,” explained Superintendent Jeff Bryant before the vote was held. “The board will consider [simplifying] the process, and just establish what that’s going to be every Friday at noon. … We appreciate your consideration.”
Although not finalized, other adjustments to the county policy are also on the table.
“We anticipate that, if the numbers go in the good direction, the direction we want, then eventually masks are going to be optional,” McCoy said. “Our plan is, when we’re green or yellow on the map on Fridays, then masks will become optional for the coming week. We know that that’s going to increase the number of individuals that need to be quarantined due to exposure.”
This is not the only adjustment that could be made to the mitigation plan.
“What we intend to offer is, for students that are identified as needing to quarantine, if the parent is willing, … we would allow them to continue to come to school, as long as they feel well and have no symptoms,” McCoy explained. “We would ask that they wear face masks while they’re in the building. They can continue to come to school if they had a daily home test that was negative. If that home test is positive, then we would ask the parent to isolate them, get a send out test, a PCR test, and if that’s positive, they would have a 10 day isolation, which is what we’re doing now with people that are positive. It would just allow students to continue to attend school, in a safe way, with a closer monitoring of those individuals that have had an exposure.”
This would be different from the county’s current system.
“When we identify a child that’s had close contact with someone who’s positive, right now we quarantine that child,” McCoy said. “We ask the parents to keep them home, monitor them for symptoms, and on day five after their exposure, they can have a COVID test. If that test is negative, then on day eight, they’re allowed to come back into the school building. [For the] children in quarantine, the rates of those that actually test positive are thankfully pretty low.”
A state-level issue has also presented new concerns and issues to the board.
“Our plan relies on the West Virginia DHHR daily COVID map. We identified back in late September that that map was being adjusted at the state level retroactively. So for instance, days that we were orange, five days later, we would go back and look at the Greenbrier County data and we wouldn’t be orange. That day, we would show up as yellow. … We’ve had some principals and some parents call, concerned about that. … It’s been suggested … that perhaps we would review that COVID map every Friday, and make a decision for the coming week rather than trying to do it on a day by day basis, just for simplicity. [It also would help for when] the map gets adjusted, we have no control over that.”
Board President Jeanie thanked McCoy and the school health team for their efforts.
“I just think we need to thank Paula,” said Wyatt. “I mean, for the last almost 10 years now, Paula works almost 24/7 for Greenbrier County Schools. You just don’t know how much we appreciate all you’ve done. I don’t think any of us thought, that first week in March, when this all started, that we would still be at, but here we are. I think we’ve done very well in keeping our children safe and healthy, and a lot of it goes back to you and your staff and we really do appreciate it. Thank you.”
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