2022-23 Health and Safety Q&A

Mask wearing will be optional for most students and staff members. Masks are required in medically fragile classrooms when staff are performing medical procedures, and in school health rooms and isolation rooms. Masks may be required in certain classrooms, cohorts, or schools on a short-term basis if there is an outbreak.

Visitors are considered adults entering the school building during the day for a limited amount of time (i.e. picking up a student for an appointment, dropping off supplies, meeting with a teacher, watching their student get an award, etc.). Visitors are highly encouraged to wear a mask when entering the building during the school day. If they are entering a health room or isolation room to pick up their student, they are required to wear a mask. If a visitor is interacting with children other than their own or spending a longer amount of time in the building with other students, they will need to go through our volunteer application process, which includes a background check, fingerprinting, and providing proof of vaccination (or requesting a medical or religious exception).

We are not taking any additional measures specific to monkeypox that would be over and above what we do for normal communicable disease mitigation or COVID-specific mitigation. At this time, the risk of monkeypox to children and adolescents in the U.S. is low. It is particularly unlikely to be spread in school because of the prolonged skin-to-skin contact that is needed for transmission. Two of the main symptoms of monkeypox are a new rash and fever, which are two of the symptoms on our Too Sick for School guidelines. Learn more about monkeypox on the Oregon Health Authority and CDC websites. 

There is no COVID-specific leave available this school year, as this falls within our normal response for being “too sick for school/work.” You would need to access your normal bank of sick time and/or family sick leave if you need to care for a family member who is ill. 

We will no longer be maintaining a COVID dashboard for our schools. It took considerable time for staff to manually enter this information on a daily basis, and now that we have entered a more endemic phase of the virus, it makes more sense for staff to focus their efforts on mitigation and outbreak investigation.

This move is in alignment with the Oregon Health Authority, which recently announced it will no longer be producing biweekly reports that include the number of COVID outbreaks in schools.