At an emergency board meeting on Friday, Nov. 19, the Mingus Union High School District Governing Board voted to pause in-person learning for the week of Monday, Nov. 30, through Tuesday, Dec. 4. According to the motion passed by the board, the school will reopen for in-person learning on Monday, Dec. 7, unless the board meets again to change the return date.
“We’ve got two benchmarks in the red and one in the yellow,” Board President Carol Anne Teague said, referring to the state benchmarks for COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, test positivity rate, and hospitalizations for COVID-like illnesses. Yavapai County has moved into the “Substantial Transmission” category — the “red” zone — for the first two categories, while remaining in “Moderate Transmission” — yellow — for the last.
“We closed the schools and we went to the hybrid opened them all based on those metrics, so now we can’t just ignore the benchmarks,” said Teague, who voted no on the motion because of a desire to keep schools closed for longer. “I need for at least one of those benchmarks to go out of the red for me to be on board” with returning for in-person learning.
Board Member Lori Drake was the other dissenting vote.
“The model is going to be more directed, teacher-led,” MUHSD Superintendent Mike Westcott said of the plans for the week away from classrooms, differing from the remote learning setup in the summer. “Teachers will have Zoom and Google Classroom set up so they can contact the students directly …. It’s not a move of the in-person students back to the Edgenuity platform.”
Westcott said that the school would yet again seek to provide chromebooks and other technological aids to families that need assistance accessing remote learning.
Schools in the Verde Valley have not been attributed to any spike in COVID-19 cases in the area, despite the recent increase in new cases of the virus, and MUHSD has seen low spread even among schools, with just 12 confirmed cases so far, according to Westcott. However the decision to close is related to fears that the current heavy spread of the virus in the community, and is based on a goal of “buffer[ing] the potential exposure people have over the holiday,” he said, as well as seeing whether other schools that do come back after Thanksgiving start to see whether new outbreaks of the virus occur on school campuses.
“Let’s not bring 700 or 800 bodies on to campus with staff when we can’t guarantee that those folks haven’t been exposed,” Westcott said.
“The transmission has been relatively low in schools, but we also haven’t followed that data when there’s been something like a Thanksgiving holiday. I think they were being cautious, where it ends up being an experiment, where we learn maybe, ’Oh transmission high in schools after you follow a break like that.’”
Westcott also said that the district would be using the time off to thoroughly clean and sanitize the campus, beyond the already heavy cleaning efforts it has been making during the in-person learning period.
