State officials release guidance on returning to school

By TONY FYFFE
BSN Editor

FRANKFORT — Schools in Kentucky must implement numerous “safety expectations” to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus if students return to the classroom this fall, according to guidelines released Thursday by state officials.
The guidelines include safety expectations that must be implemented at all schools in addition to “best practices” that schools can choose to follow “in order the optimize the safety of students and staff.”
As determined by the Kentucky Department for Public Health, the expectations include social distancing; screening, school exclusion and contact tracing; personal protective equipment (PPE), including cloth face masks; and sanitation, environmental and industrial factors.

Social Distancing

• Stagger arrival and dismissal times.
• Increase space between students by rearranging seating to maximize space between students to be 6 feet or greater.
• Reduce class sizes to allow for smaller cohorts of students to decrease the potential need for contact tracing.
• Modify classes and activities that normally require multiple students to engage in an activity that could cause close social contact, congestion or movement in hallways, such as gym class, choir, art, music, etc.
• Reduce congestion in common areas such as the school office, nurse’s office, guidance office and bus-loading areas.
• Limit non-essential visitors on school property.
• Ensure that students go straight from vehicles to their classrooms to avoid congregating.
• Limit cross transfer between special programs and school staff and develop a plan for limiting substitutes, student teachers and evaluators.
• Develop a bus transportation plan that includes sanitation, screening and social distance plans. Wearing a mask while riding on a school bus is mandatory, unless medically waived.
Additional, non-mandatory best practices include placing physical barriers such as Plexiglas at reception desks and similar areas; having meals served to the classroom or having students bring food from the cafeteria back to their classrooms to eat, if social distancing is not possible in the cafeteria; and minimizing face-to-face interactions by designating one-way hallway traffic and designating certain doors for entry and exit.

Cloth Face Coverings,
Personal Protective
Equipment and School Health Policies

• Students and staff should be required to wear a cloth face covering, unless medically waived.
• Masks can be lowered during classroom time if all students and staff are seated 6 feet apart and no persons are walking around inside the classroom.
• Students are not required to wear a mask when they are outside and 6 feet from others.
• Schools should develop a standard for masks to assure messaging or images on them align with the school dress code.
• Schools should develop a plan for the purchase or donation of cloth masks for provision to students who arrive without a mask or do not have resources to obtain a mask.
• Gloves are to be worn for cleaning and sanitation, food service, and school health procedures.
• Staff should be trained on when to use PPE; what PPE is necessary; where PPE is stored; how to properly put on and take off PPE; and how to administer nebulizer treatments and peak flow meters.

Screening and
School Exclusion

• Temperature checks with a touchless thermometer for all students and staff at the point of school property entry. To ride the school bus, parents must attest that the student’s temperature is not more than 100.4 when boarding the bus. The student’s temperature will be checked again when on school property.
• Students or staff should stay home or be sent home if their temperature is more than 100.4, they have a cough, are vomiting or have diarrhea, they have a new rash, they have had exposure to a COVID-19 case during a 48-hour period before the onset of symptoms until meeting the criteria for discontinuing home isolation.

Sanitation and
Environmental Standards

• Schools must post signs throughout the building encouraging proper hand and respiratory hygiene practices.
• All school facilities must be cleaned and disinfected daily.
• Schools must collaborate with local health departments for guidance on closures and reopenings.
• Schools must make hand-cleaning supplies readily available.

Contact Tracing

• Schools must notify their local health department of any positive cases of COVID-19 and be prepared to cooperate with the contact tracing procedure with manifests of bus transportation, classroom cohorts, cafeteria setting charts, etc., that will allow quick identification of those at high risk of infection.