Whitehall-Coplay School Board held education/student activities, operations/transportation and finance/personnel committee meetings Jan. 10. Whitehall-Coplay School District Superintendent Dr. Robert Steckel and the board discussed updating the district’s health and safety plan. The plan was last updated in September 2021 and needs to be approved every six months.

Current COVID-19 protocols include masking on buses and in health room facilities, social distancing when possible, encouraging basic hygiene like hand washing, promoting the use of sanitation stations and assigned seats and/or social distancing at lunch.

Steckel said district maintenance staff are constantly sanitizing and deep cleaning if there is a positive case. Bipolar ionizers have been installed in the HVAC systems to help eliminate some infection.

For lunches, there are extra tables, staggered lunch schedules and empty seats between students to help prevent the spread of germs.

Currently, Whitehall-Coplay Middle School is utilizing the gym as a second lunch space, but Steckel said he wants to return to using the gym for its intended purpose due to winter sports.

Steckel said using the cafeteria exclusively for lunch would stop the lengthy and difficult daily process of taking down the “cafeteria” in the gym each afternoon and setting it back up every morning.

Current Pennsylvania Department of Health guidelines say it is recommended that asymptomatic close contacts quarantine for five days, but it is not enforceable.

Weekly COVID-19 cases in WCSD are reported to the Department of Health each Friday.

When a student in a child’s classroom tests positive for COVID-19, the district sends parents an email notification that the child was a potential close contact.

Steckel wants to discuss implementing a test-to-stay program. COVID-19 testing would be voluntary with the purpose of testing asymptomatic close contacts, especially helpful when tests are in high demand and hard to find. The choice to have the child tested would be made by the parents.

Board member Kerri Kromer asked if students are being checked for symptoms when they return from quarantine but was told it is not feasible with the number of cases.

Kromer also asked if anything changes if students are masked or unmasked. Steckel informed her if two people are wearing masks and are between 3 and 6 feet apart, neither are identified as a close contact if one would test positive for COVID-19.

Board member Dr. Nichole Hartman asked that close contact notifications be sent through text as well as through emails.

Hartman works in the health care field and said masking in schools should be mandatory.

“We are in such a horrible time right now, and masks being optional - I wish that wasn’t the case,” Hartman said. “If we can do anything to stop what’s happening out there, that would be one way to do it, even with the belief that they don’t do what they’re supposed to do.

“It’s bad, and people are very upset that we’re saying ‘let’s put 20 kids in a room, and let’s not have them mask up,’ when we could try to do something to at least try to not spread this virus,” Hartman added.

Steckel said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the two local health networks are recommending universal masking. He will be meeting with St. Luke’s University Health Network for an update on recommendations.

Steckel also said masking is not the only mitigation strategy. According to Steckel, proactive cleaning and bipolar ionizers that have been in use since November 2021 and vaccines and boosters are ways to prevent illness.

Steckel said WCSD monitors positive cases in the 18052 ZIP code.

Christopher Schiffert, assistant to the superintendent, said the threshold for closing schools is different now than at the height of the first wave of the pandemic. There needs to be a positive case rate of 5 percent of students and staff in a 14-day window in order for a school to close. Large schools can have a maximum of 45 cases, and medium schools can have 25 to 45.

Schiffert said a total of 39 cases at WHS was the highest number so far.

He said student absences are comparable to the 2018-19 school year, when average attendance was between 80 and 93 percent.

Steckel said board members will need to decide, at the next meeting, if they should continue with the current method of contact tracing and the way cases are being communicated to close contacts.

The board and Steckel also talked about giving Steckel temporary authority to make changes to the health and safety plan, but that decision can’t be made until the next school board meeting.

The school board next meets 7 p.m. Jan. 24.