Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Good afternoon, Artesians!
I finally have some good news to share regarding our stoplight status!
My team and I have been monitoring our covid impacted students and staff, our county numbers and the overall spread as we see it today. As a county, the positivity rate is coming down and as of today is at 11.9%. We are no longer a red county on the state provided metric data. This is great news!
Based on these facts, we have determined that we will start the school year in green for ALL PREK-12TH Grade students on Tuesday, January 5th, the first student day scheduled back. If we all do our small part, I believe we can maintain at green moving forward. It will all depend on how seriously we as a community take the guidelines and keep ourselves healthy.
As I’ve shared numerous times over the last several months, we continue to find ourselves in a difficult situation due to staff being out. Buildings cannot run or be safely supervised without teachers and support staff. I’m pleased to report that we only have 7 people out for covid related reasons now as compared to 45-55 daily prior to the break. This doesn’t lessen my concern for the 7 people impacted, but it does give me hope that we’re over a bit of a hump from Thanksgiving festivities.
We will continue to keep safety measures in place, continue cleaning at the higher levels we have been and will continue to contact trace per CDC, State Department of Health and the Morgan County Department of Health guidelines.
This improvement of overall health should also allow us to ease our restrictions on the number of people attending extra curricular event activities in the coming week. Tickets on sale for this weekend’s games will increase to 4 per athlete/participant.
Long story short, the only way we stay green is to work together to keep ourselves healthy. We fully expect to have a surge again shortly after the school year starts due to Christmas Holiday exposures, but I’m optimistic people have been doing their part these last two weeks to stay healthy and we will see a smaller spike than we did after Thanksgiving.
Thank you for your ongoing support of our teachers, support staff and administrators as we’ve tried to balance both safety and learning during this horrible time in our history. As we move into 2021, let’s let our focus be on pulling things back together for our kids!
Stay well, stay healthy, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Dr. Arthur
