Formal school policy now in place

A week after Jay School Board passed a resolution authorizing superintendent Jeremy Gulley to formalize COVID-19 exclusion protocols, those policies are now in place.

Jay Schools on Thursday afternoon released the “student exclusion guidelines,” which formalize the process the corporation has been using since school started Sept. 9.

The guidelines call for the following:

•Once a school nurse has been informed of a positive case involving a student, nurses and administrators conduct contact tracing by using seating charts and talking with students and staff. Parents of students who are deemed “close contacts” are informed. Data is shared with Jay County Health Department and Indiana State Department of Health.

•Students who have had close contact with someone outside of school who is COVID-19 positive are excluded from school for 14 days from their last exposure.

•Most students whose close contact was in a school setting can remain in school if they wear a mask and parents report any changes in health to the school nurse. (School nurses have the discretion to exclude students if their in-school contact was extended or direct, such as sitting closely at the same lunch table or as part of an athletic activity.)

•Students who have been excluded because of a close contact in school may return if they provide a negative COVID-19 test that is seven days from the last exposure.

Gulley laid out the rationale for the policy last week, noting that thus far Jay Schools has had no known student-to-student spread within its buildings. He added that data from 21 other districts showed a transmission rate of 0.71% — 50 cases out of 7,032 exclusions.

“In a school setting, the precautions that are there — cleaning, cohorting, mask-wearing — were producing a different result than the close contacts outside of a school setting where those precautions aren’t necessarily known to us,” Gulley said. “Close contacts out of the school … that’s where it was obvious transmissions were happening. …

“We made those decisions based on facts as we have them,” he added. “When those facts change, we must be prepared to change. …

“If we have to make adjustments, we will.”

The guidelines released Thursday for contact tracing and school exclusion came a week after the school board approved a resolution authorizing Gulley to formalize the policies. The resolution also supports efforts to create a testing program and authorizes Gulley to take action as required if “the urgency of the situation dictates the necessity for immediate decisive action.”

As of Thursday evening, 19 Jay School Corporation students were excluded because of positive COVID-19 tests and 125 were excluded because of close contacts. In terms of employees, five were excluded for positive tests and 14 for being close contacts.

Gulley said there’s no “magic number” for how many exclusions would result in schools being closed, but rather that he tracks community spread data and information from the school corporation’s nursing staff in making such decisions.