JAY — Contact tracing has been temporarily suspended in Regional School Unit 73 where students attend Spruce Mountain schools.
Superintendent Scott Albert notified the community of the change through emails and phone calls prior to the Board of Directors meeting Thursday night, but also noted it during the meeting.
“You’ve received a couple of robo-calls, one last week and one today talking about changes in standard operating procedures,” Albert said. The one major change last week was less quarantine time is needed, which helps students be out of school less, he noted. It dropped from 10 to five days if following mask mandates and since RSU 73 does have a mask mandate, close contacts wouldn’t have to quarantine, also keeping students in school, he added.
The only students and staff who will need to quarantine/isolate from school will be those with symptoms and/or those that tested positive for COVID, Albert’s email from Jan. 5 noted.
Today’s call told of the temporary stoppage of contact tracing, Albert said. With the omicron variant being so prevalent, the amount of time involved, kids out on quarantine it would be impossible to try to contact trace, he added.
“Due to the rise in community transmission, the Maine CDC and Maine DOE revised the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) on January 12, 2022, and are allowing temporary suspension of contact tracing for schools that have a universal masking policy due to the rise of the omicron variant. This temporary suspension allows nurses and other personnel to focus on mitigating strategies like detecting and preventing infected people from being in schools via pooled testing and attending to sick students,” Albert’s email earlier Thursday noted.
“The Maine CDC has determined that, because the omicron variant is far more contagious than prior variants, has a shorter incubation period, and tends to spread in the early part of an infection, it is contributing to higher levels of community transmission, making community exposures more frequent and, consequently, reducing the effectiveness of contact tracing in schools,” the email continued.
“It’s not just us,” Albert said during the meeting. “You can walk into Hannaford’s, walk into one of the schools, a restaurant there is risk because community transmission is so high. We don’t know when they will go back to contact tracing at this point.
“Since the first day of school, there have been 424 positive cases in the district with 360 students — 26% of the student population — and 63 adults working in the district,” he said. That’s 25% of the adult population, he noted. If too many staff members are lost keeping schools open could become an issue, he said.
“We’ve seen the numbers are going back up again,” Albert said. “Our goal is to keep students in schools, keep schools open.”
In other business, Directors unanimously approved the superintendent’s salary of $114,000 for July 31, 2022 to June 30, 2023 (Fiscal Year 22-23) and $117,000 for Fiscal Year 23-24.
In June 2020, Albert’s contract was extended three years, with some monetary changes. The board approved increasing his salary by 2.5% for 2020-21 and 2021-22 and increasing travel reimbursement from $500 to $750 in 2020-21. Salary’ was to be renegotiated in the spring of 2022 for fiscal year 2022-23.
Directors also approved allowing Spruce Mountain High School to hold the prom on May 7 at Boothby’s Orchard and Farm Winery in Livermore. The site has been donated for free.
“We’re looking to have dancing, a traditional-style prom,” Principal TJ Plourde said. He knows there are too many variables to make those decisions now.
A bus will provide transportation from the high school and back for students who won’t have their own and all rules in place while on school grounds will be followed, Plourde said.
“I can tell you prom is probably the least problematic,” Plourde said when asked if he knew what to expect at an off-site venue. “The kids spend a lot of money on the night so there are some really good attitudes, some really good times.”
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