Hello all,
It looks like the numbers are going in the right direction since last week. We have dropped from a 21.4% (14 day) positivity rate last week to a 12.8% (14 day) positivity rate this week in Monticello. That is a very good sign for our school district. In Monticello, there has been 1 positive COVID case in the last 3 days, 9 positive COVID cases in the last 7 days, and 23 positive COVID cases in the last 14 days. Those numbers have also continued to improve since the middle of November.
New and continuing guidance from the Governor this week. One change to our extracurricular activities is that each participant gets two tickets for an event. In addition, we will allow any other members of a household to attend. That really means siblings can attend for most families.
I received some information this week about school staff. It looks like the vaccine will be available for school staff in late January or early February. Second dose to follow a month later. No information on students over or under 16 at this time. If our staff is vaccinated, we will be able to consider returning to 100% in-person learning to finish the school year. It is probably still too far out to know if we can do that yet, but we need to be thinking ahead. Where we are at when we return to school in January will be our next hurdle.
Our updated numbers for this week are as follows:
- We currently have approximately 8 students and 1 staff in isolation (these people are showing a variety of symptoms) and approximately 10 students and 0 staff in quarantine (these people have been exposed to someone with COVID-19, not necessarily at school). That is less than 2% of our student body and less than 1% of our staff that is out for COVID-19 related reasons. This number is down a bit from last week.
- We still have many students participating in online learning. As of today, we have approximately 207 Prek-12 students participating in full online learning or hybrid online learning. That is approximately 21% of our student body taking one or more online courses. This number has dropped slightly over the last week.
That is it for this week. This will be my last letter until January 8, so until then happy holidays and please be safe!!!
Dr. Brian Jaeger, Superintendent