A plan to welcome all students back in person and full time to Schreiber High School and Carrie Palmer Weber Middle School has been put on hold due to new federal health guidelines, Port Washington School Superintendent Michael Hynes said at a school board meeting on Tuesday night via Zoom.
Schreiber students were originally scheduled to return April 19, and Weber students on April 26.
“I know for a fact there is nothing more that the Board of Education, the district office, certainly our teachers, administrators and staff want more than anything than to bring our secondary students back full time,” Hynes said. “But as we know, school districts, and departments of health in each county were thrown a curveball. And so I want to unpack what that looks like, what that means.”
The “curveball” came from new guidelines issued this week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and supported by the New York State Department of Health, with certain rules dealing with desk shields and most notably, a three-foot distance rather than six feet.
“The CDC no longer recommends, and I’m going to underscore ‘recommends,’ physical barriers to mitigation when physical distancing cannot be maintained,” Hynes said. “So that means before when the guidance stated that in order to go less than six feet you had to have physical barriers, now they have stated that you no longer have to do that.”
But, he said, Port Washington’s place in a county labeled “high transmission,” or a “red zone,” means that secondary students are still mandated to be six feet apart in a cohort, which is where groups of students are kept together with the same peers and staff throughout the school day.
“The way [the state] defines [high transmission] is by looking at on a seven-day average of total new cases per 100,000 persons,” Hynes said. “Then a county is classified or designated as red. And when this happens, it really, really restricts the ability for school districts, specifically at the secondary level, to do what we wanted to do before this new guidance came out.”
The designation then paused the re-entry plans until future notice.
“Since the guidance [was announced], we have put our plan on hold in order to evaluate any changes that need to be made,” Hynes said. “In the event that changes are made that allow our students to return to the original plans, this will be implemented. Now both schools would require a few days of remote instruction, just to make sure that we can prepare the buildings to bring everyone back.”
He added that of all the discussions he had conducted with those involved in the decision, the most “painful” came from Schreiber seniors who were unsure if they would get to be back at school.
“I’ve heard from our students, specifically our seniors who are incredibly upset about this change, and this sudden change,” Hynes said. “And those are probably some of the most painful conversations I’ve had, because I understand what they’re feeling. We can’t pretend to be a senior, but I know that they were excited to come back and not just as seniors but certainly our middle school students and certainly the rest of our high school kids.”
