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COVID concerns are a hot topic for School Board

RANDOLPH - The Randolph Public Schools agreed to a three-day mask mandate at the high school last week and are making plans to acquire COVID-19 testing kits as the pandemic continues to keep administrators busy.

The mask mandate was put into place after an increase of COVID-19 cases linked within the student body, Superintendent Jeff Hoesing told school board members last week.

The Northeast Nebraska Public Health Department recommended masks  to avoid a possible Designated Health Measure (DHM) specific to the high school that would include contact tracing and quarantine for otherwise healthy students.

“There’s no guarantee with our governor that HHS would’ve issued that DHM but it’s always a possibility,” Hoesing said. “We were positioning ourselves to take a stand.”

But then the health department took into account the last date of attendance for the most recent positive cases and started the two-week mask requirement from that date which ultimately resulted in a total of three days.

“They were really flexible . . . We figured three days, we can compromise on that,” Hoesing said.

He said he doesn’t want to repeat last year’s protocols in which the principals conducted contact tracing to identify anyone who had spent more than 15 minutes with an ill student at closer than six feet.

This year’s protocol is for symptomatic students to stay home from school until they receive a negative COVID test result or an alternative diagnosis can be reached from a doctor. COVID-positive students will be out of school for 10 days, starting from when symptoms first occurred.

Hoesing said the health department will now accept over-the-counter COVID test results for students to enter back into school.

Although sometimes difficult to obtain due to demand, the school is working to get a few of the testing kits at about $35 for antigen tests and $125 for Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests. Federal COVID stimulus funds may be used for the purchase.

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