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Once again, Del Norte Unified School District finds itself scrambling to ensure classrooms are staffed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But unlike earlier in the school year, when the delta variant swept through the community, those who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus are either asymptomatic or are experiencing minor symptoms, said DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris.

“I was contacted by a staff member the other day who happened to have been in the office and wanted to let me know they were positive,” Harris told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Friday. “Their only symptom was they had a little bit of a scratchy throat.”

As of Thursday, 113 new coronavirus cases were reported to the Del Norte Public Health Branch, according to the county’s COVID-19 Information Hub. This included six new cases among the county’s incarcerated population. There are 420 active cases in Del Norte County as of Thursday and five people are hospitalized with COVID symptoms.

As of DNUSD’s last posted update, Jan. 19, 14 students and 15 employees had tested positive for COVID. On Tuesday, the district notified people via Facebook that updated information regarding COVID in the district would be delayed because a “large portion” of the staff that compiles that information were out on quarantine.

Though he said he’d be guessing on the exact numbers, hundreds of students were out of the classroom on Friday, most because they were a close contact to someone who tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Assistant Superintendent of Business Jeff Napier. Especially in the lower grades like kindergarten and first grade, if one student tests positive for COVID, the entire class is usually quarantined, he said.

On Tuesday, however, guidance from the California Department of Public Health cut the 10-day quarantine and isolation period for coronavirus patients and close contacts in half. As a result, some students who had to quarantine could be back to school on Monday as long as an antigen test is negative for COVID, Napier said.

“Very few of the kids that we have quarantined are becoming positive from exposure in the classroom,” he told the Outpost. “There are some little clusters in a classroom — maybe two or three kids turned out positive — but in many classrooms with one positive, everybody went home on quarantine and none of those quarantined kids turned up positive. It’s not spreading really fast in the schools.”

Office staff at the district’s schools and in its office are being kept busy with contact tracing and notification currently, Napier said.
“COVID is consuming a lot of everyone’s time right at the moment,” he said.

In addition to office staff conducting contact tracing, those with teaching credentials at the district office, who don’t currently teach have been called into classrooms to sub, Napier said. This includes Assistant Superintendent of Educational Services Tom Kissinger, Human Resources director Coleen Parker and Napier himself.
Harris said he has substituted for a handful of school principals who had to isolate or quarantine because “we had more people out than we had substitutes available.”

To remedy the situation, the district has hired substitute teachers on a full-time basis, guaranteeing them work every day through the end of the year, Harris said. This means they’ll get substitute pay for every day they’ll show up for work plus health benefits.

“We wanted to try to get substitutes who were committed to being at work every day to limit the impact that substitute calling was having on our human resources department,” Harris said, “and to decrease the anxiety of teachers in school sites.”

Harris said he hopes the changed quarantine and isolation guidance will mean students and staff will be out of the classroom or off work for shorter amounts of time.

Meanwhile, Del Norte Unified continues to receive rapid test kits to test unvaccinated staff and employees who are displaying COVID symptoms, Harris said. The district is also testing its student athletes weekly.

DNUSD also received rapid tests from the state earlier in the month. According to Harris, they were supposed to arrive before the end of winter break, but that didn’t happen, so parents were asked to test their students on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

“That way if a kid was positive, we would go back two days for contact tracing, which would take us to Saturday,” he said. “And there would not be a reason to close a class for a positive (case) or to quarantine additional students.”

Some of those test kits are still available to parents with students in Del Norte schools, including Castle Rock Charter School and Uncharted Shores Academy, Harris said.

“Those tests are earmarked one per enrolled student,” he said. “They cannot be given to adults and they cannot be handed out to the community. They can only go to students who have not picked up a test kit.”

With the changing guidance surrounding COVID parents should keep an eye on the DNUSD website or its Facebook page for accurate information on what that guidance means for their youngsters, Harris said.

He acknowledged that this could be difficult since that guidance has been updated roughly 10 times in the past 2-3 weeks, but the press releases parents are seeing from CDPH or from CalOSHA don’t apply to schools.

“I would really just encourage people to go directly to the source, the district website, the district Facebook page, the district’s Family COVID page, to get the most up to date information,” he said. “And be cautious about what they hear on social media because social media is reflective of all that guidance and all of those updates. It’s also reflective of opinion and it’s not really reflective of what the requirements are (for) schools.”

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