By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
Levy County schools recorded 18 positive COVID-19 cases in the first week of classes with two classrooms and one busload of students sent home for quarantine, county officials said Tuesday.
“We’ve had two closures and we’re in the midst of an investigation right now – football,” said Levy County Health Department head nurse Jeannie Norris at a school board meeting.
Most of the students and staff affected by the closures weren’t sick. They were sent home because they had been in contact with someone who tested positive.
One of the closures involved 17 students and their teacher. A second closure impacted 26 students plus an additional 25 students from a school bus at the same school.
“When we make classroom visits we measure to see who was in close proximity; we were measuring how many feet between bus seats yesterday,” Norris said. “We’re trying not to send home any more than we absolutely have to, but we want to stay within our guidelines and not have anyone at risk still at school.”
Norris will retire soon and her future replacement, Angie Philips, took part in the discussion and brought along a list of COVID-19 statistics related to the school district’s first week of operations.
The first week of school saw 5,414 students enrolled in Levy County public schools.
School Closure Guideline
Kalee Wade, coordinator of benefits and risk management, said district staff has developed a flexible guideline that allows a school to be closed when “20 percent of the school reports exposure to COVID-19.”
She said staff borrowed the guideline from another school district. She said the 20 percent number won’t automatically result in the closure of a school. She said the health department, school superintendent, and school board members would make the decision based on the individual school’s circumstances.
“I think what it’s going to come down to is staff. We only have a limited number of substitutes. If we don’t have enough staff members on campus to teach our students, that’s when the issue’s going to come in,” she said. “This is just a guideline. It’s just – know this is very flexible depending on the situation at the school.”
Football and COVID-19
The school board unanimously approved a set of guidelines for football, volleyball and cross country teams. The rules guide practices and competitions.
Football guidelines, on their face, looked like the district was reinventing the game.
But that wasn’t the case.
The new rules extend the coaches box along both sides of the field to 60 yards (between the 20-yard lines) to give coaches and players enough room to social distance as they stand watching the game. They should like the rule. It gets them closer to the end zone.
Halftimes are reduced from 20 minutes to 12 minutes to avoid too much close contact between players and coaches. The experts say COVID-19 can spread when people are in close contact for 15 minutes and aren’t wearing masks.
“All of this is designed to reduce contact between players,” said Assistant Superintendent John Lott.
Football spectators will be asked to stand or sit six feet apart for social distancing purposes. They will also be encouraged to wear masks.
The guidelines encourage social distancing by players in locker rooms. Hand sanitizer is recommended for the players.
Practice sessions started this week. The guidelines say no huddles are allowed in practices. When practicing 11 on 11 full contact, practice is limited to a single 9-minute offensive session and a single 9-minute defensive session per day during preseason.
During the regular season, full contact live tackling would be limited to two 9-minute sessions two days a week and one 9-minute offensive session and one 9-minute defensive session two days a week.
Lott said the guidelines are recommendations more than anything.
“It’s a consideration. It’s not something in stone. It’s not like there are fines if you don’t do exactly what it says,” Lott said. “These are considerations and recommendations. We’ll do the best we can to follow these.”
Tackling, Huddles
Will the games be played as usual with hard-hitting?
“Well, you’re not going to be tackling anybody and staying on top of them for 15 minutes, so it’s not going to meet that threshold. I don’t think it affects huddles. Huddles don’t last 15 minutes,” Lott said.
Lott said it is possible that the football season could be shortened for a team that is quarantined and a game had to be cancelled and couldn’t be rescheduled.
“Once it starts in a team, the whole team could be quarantined. It doesn’t mean they are all sick. It means they are quarantined. We don’t know the answer to those questions. There’s a lot of what if’s we don’t know the answers to,” Lott said. “Could a game be shortened if they had to cancel a game and couldn’t reschedule it? Yeah, it could happen.”
While flexibility is built into the sport’s guidelines, Lott said coaches have to remember that when they have a group of young athletes gathered together and they aren’t six feet apart and aren’t wearing masks, “you could have an entire team quarantined.”
“It doesn’t mean they are all sick. It means they are quarantined because they could be sick. Nobody wants that. That’s what they have to remember,” he said.
Lott said the COVID-19 numbers in the Levy County school district are low at this point with just a couple of incidents thus far, and he said a lot of the students that part of the statistics quoted at the board meeting, “were in quarantine before school ever started.”
“The numbers may sound higher. We could have an incident in school every day. It’s fluid. We don’t want that to happen but it could happen,” he said.
He said the school district doesn’t make the decisions about quarantining students or staff. The health department makes the call.
“Once we know there’s potential exposure we turn it over to the health department. They do an investigation and they determine who has to be quarantined and who doesn’t,” Lott said.
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Photo by Linda Dean Cooper August 25, 2020
School Board of Levy County Regular Meeting August 25, 2020; Posted August 25, 2020
