School returning to in-person

Jay County Junior-Senior High School students will return to in-person classes Monday.

Jay School Corporation superintendent Jeremy Gulley announced late Wednesday afternoon that junior-senior high students will head back to their classrooms Monday after shifting to virtual learning this week.

The junior-senior high has been closed since students departed at the end of the day Nov. 24 for Thanksgiving break because of an increase in the spread of coronavirus in the county. The county’s elementary schools have continued with in-person learning.

Though Jay County was still “red” (severe) on the Indiana State Department of Health update Wednesday, Gulley said other factors such as a significant reduction in the number of students and staff in quarantine drove the decision to return to in-person learning. He added that the time off allowed for the detection of cases of COVID-19 following holiday gatherings last week.

“I think having the week off after Thanksgiving was the correct decision to let everyone see the effects of that, give it a week,” he added. “By the time you come back on Monday, if there were any COVID cases during the week then people would know that and they’d be able to isolate. That’s part of the logic.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, Jay Schools had a total of 119 students and seven staff members “excluded” either for testing positive for COVID-19 or being a close contact with someone who has tested positive. Those numbers are down from 203 and 16, respectively, when the shift to virtual learning was announced last week.

While the corporation’s COVID-19 guidelines call for the junior-senior high to transition “to fully remote learning” when the county is at a red designation, it also notes that such decisions will not be based solely on the state’s weekly update. Rather, changes will evaluate trends at the local level to respond in a “targeted” way.

Gulley noted that data continues to show that schools are not a significant contributor to the spread of coronavirus, pointing to comments made recently by director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fauci addressed the school issue this week, saying that spread "among children and from children is not really very big at all, not like one would have suspected. So let’s try to get the kids back, but let’s try to mitigate the things that maintain and just push the kind of community spread that we’re trying to avoid.”

Heath Butz of Jay County Health Department concurred with those assessments.

“That was one of the main factors,” he said. “We’re not seeing the schools as a contributing factor to community spread.”

Butz also noted that Jay County’s indicators — cases per 100,000 and overall positivity — are lower than they were last week.

Those numbers were 699.7 and 15.8% as of Wednesday’s state health department report, which would still put the county in a red designation but are down from their peaks.

The county saw a lull in new cases from about Nov. 21 through Nov. 28, with an average of 15.6 per day over that span. The local numbers have shot back up with 89 cases over the last three days for an average of 29.7.

Butz and Gulley both noted that health department and school officials meet each Tuesday to discuss the best path forward.

“We stay flexible depending on what we see going on as far as the overall community data,” said Butz.

Gulley reiterated his intent to keep schools open if possible.

“I just think the best place for kids to learn is in a school, in a classroom, with teachers,” he said. “And we’re going to try to keep these schools open as long as we can. It’s going to be driven by data. And it’s going to be determined in concert with our health department.”

Jay School Corporation also implemented its first built-in two-hour delay Wednesday, a change Jay School Board approved at its November meeting to allow teachers more time to plan during what has been a stressful year. Gulley said that time allowed staff to collaborate on virtual learning and to prepare to work with students both in-person and virtually.

“It was something our teachers asked for and it was justified,” said Gulley. “I think it was appreciated and was useful. And it worked.”