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Previously:

• Hundreds of Students Quarantining Due to COVID as DNUSD Scrambles to Find Subs for Classrooms

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Del Norte County’s superintendent of schools says he expects to see students on campus consistently thanks to new public health guidance stating that children don’t have to quarantine unless they test positive for the coronavirus.

Students and school staff will still have to wear face coverings in the classroom even though California’s indoor mask mandate is set to end next week, Del Norte Unified School District Superintendent Jeff Harris said Thursday. Harris noted that in California masks are still required in healthcare and long-term care settings, public transportation and at public schools.

“They did announce Tuesday they are reviewing school mask mandates and they may come out with updated school mask guidance shortly, but we haven’t heard a specific timeline or what that guidance may look like,” he told the Outpost.

Oregon is lifting its school mask requirements on March 31, according to Harris.

On Jan. 12, the California Department of Public Health issued new guidance that allows schools to conduct “group tracing” rather than individual contact tracing if a student was exposed to COVID-19.

Speaking at a community webinar on Wednesday, Harris said parents would receive an “exposure” notice if a positive case turned up in their child’s classroom either that evening or the following day.

Those notices would inform parents that their child could remain at school as long as they were asymptomatic and didn’t test positive, according to Jeff Napier, DNUSD’s assistant superintendent of business. The notice would state that CDPH “strongly recommend, but does not require, that your child get tested” and would inform parents where they can get those tests, Napier said.

Children have to stay at home and isolate if they develop symptoms or test positive, Napier told parents.

Students who are isolating due to COVID must do so for at least five days, Harris said. If they’re no longer symptomatic and an antigen test comes back negative, they can return to school, he told the Outpost.

“If they test on Day 5 and are asymptomatic and negative, they can come back on Day 6,” Harris told the Outpost. “Otherwise, if they don’t test and are asymptomatic, they can come back to school on Day 11 — they have to be on quarantine for 10 days.”

Previously, if an exposure occurred on campus, staff had to identify the student who was positive, determine when their last day on campus occurred and who they came in contact with, Harris said. Staff then had to notify those close contacts and their families within a 24-hour period that they may have been exposed to COVID, he said.

Site administrators and school nurses often worked well into the night and on weekends doing individual contact tracing, Harris said. Depending on the day of the week a positive case showed up, staff could have been telling up to 90 students to stay home and quarantine, he said.

“Quarantine was designed not to bring ill or potentially ill students back onto campus,” Harris said. “If they were notified at 5 o’clock that a child in their class that day was COVID positive, we were trying to contact the class before they came to school the next day. It was putting families in a position where they were having to get last-minute child care and it was almost impossible. We were having families afraid they were going to lose their job because they had to be absent from work so much.”

Meanwhile, changing guidance governing crowds, particularly a new determination that a mega event is 1,000 or more people, will enable Del Norte High School’s Thunen Gym to be at full capacity for any playoff game the school hosts, said Bob Hadfield, the school’s athletics director.

Wrestlers headed to a Humboldt-Del Norte League tournament this weekend will still only be allowed four spectators each, keeping that number under 500 people, Hadfield said.

There are no limitations to outdoor crowds and no testing required for outdoor athletics, he told parents on Wednesday.

“The kids are great about testing. There’s no grumbling,” Hadfield said. “And our nursing staff has done an excellent job in testing the athletes up to this point. They’ve bent over backwards to accommodate kids who may have forgotten their test date.”

During Wednesday’s webinar, Harris took questions from parents who continued to push back against vaccine and mask mandates. In response to one query — What happens with children who refuse to wear a face covering? — Harris said the district would not discipline that child, but would follow CDPH guidance and separate them from the rest of their class. School staff may also notify that child’s parents, he said.

“We are not choosing to discipline students and we will not discipline students,” Harris said. “There will be no suspension, no expulsion for masking issues.”

Harris also acknowledged that California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that vaccines would be mandatory for 7th-12th grade students starting July 1. There is also a State Senate bill circulating through the Legislature that would eliminate personal belief and religious belief exemptions to vaccine mandates and would add the COVID inoculation to the list of shots students are required to receive to attend school, Harris said.

“If that happens, there will be no exemptions other than a medical exemption that is ordered by a physician that’s then put through what’s called the California Immunization Registry,” he said. “One of the things we have been lobbying for is to keep personal, religious and medical exemptions on board. We believe families should have a right to determine what medical care is necessary for their children.”

Del Norte County was seeing 384 active COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, according to the Public Health Branch. Nine people are hospitalized with coronavirus symptoms and 43 people have died since the pandemic began in March.

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