MUSD outlines COVID protocols

The protocols in place for the new school year in Maricopa Unified School District look much like those at the end of last year.

There will be no mask mandates, but school and district officials have outlined policies designed to keep students, faculty, and staff as safe as possible, such as:

• Optional use of masks
• Social distancing when possible
• Frequent hand-washing; and
• Regular cleaning, disinfecting and electrostatic spraying of classrooms and buses.

Anyone testing positive will be required to isolate for 10 days. If a student has a known exposure to an infected person, the student will quarantine at the parents’ discretion. Quarantined students will have a digital option to keep up with classwork, but classes will not be taught via video. The work will be self-paced through materials provided digitally by the school.

Superintendent Tracey Lopeman told the governing board the district has developed a new COVID-19 dashboard to inform parents and the community of the number of active cases among students and staff at any school in a given week. The dashboard https://www.musd20.org/covid19dashboard and numbers will be updated each Friday. Full mitigation protocols for varying levels of positive tests per classroom are also outlined on the dashboard.

As of Aug. 6, there were 51 cases across the district’s 10 schools and the district office, which includes 9,143 students, faculty, staff, and administrators.

Tracey Pastor, MUSD’s director of administrative services, said the district may need stronger mitigation measures if five or more confirmed cases in a class are present.

“The administrative recommendation is to coordinate with Pinal County and to closely follow their recommendations and to consider mandatory quarantine of the class,” she said.

Governing board member Torri Anderson voiced concern over the availability of teachers, given the anecdotal evidence she is hearing that many teachers currently are out with COVID.

“My concern is, what happens when we don’t have enough teachers – what’s the mitigation plan then?” she asked. “You can only double up classes so many times. I’m just concerned what that mitigation is going to look like when that happens. You can’t teach if you’ve got 60 kids in class with one teacher. it’s just not safe and it’s not healthy at all. It’s a setup for disaster.”

In what could be seen as an indication of some parents’ reluctance to send their children back to in-person schooling, Maricopa Virtual Academy, the district’s online school, has a record 332 students enrolled. All MVA courses are taught by certified instructors.