CCSD offers plan on mask-wearing, distance learning as classes return

Students and teachers won’t be required to mask up — unless they have been exposed to COVID-19 — as the Clark County School District returns to classes next month.

District officials gave an update this month on the plan for returning to in-person learning, which it revises every six months as part of a federal requirement to receive COVID relief funding. The next update will come no later than January.

“We do have quite a bit of staff and services supporting our students, and so I think in that regard, we are definitely in a better place and we have more strategies for our students and families,” Assistant Superintendent Monica Cortez said at a recent Clark County School Board meeting.

The district’s plan includes guidelines about when students and staff must wear masks after exposure to COVID-19, contact tracing, quarantining, testing and monitoring outbreaks at schools.

Last school year had extreme staffing shortages that prompted a five-day pause in January, when classes were canceled amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Board Trustee Danielle Ford asked at the July 14 meeting if the district has any emergency plan in place in the event of another pause.

“That five-day pause, it wasn’t planned for, the community and parents didn’t expect it, and it was really disruptive to a lot of families, including mine,” Ford said. “If cases continue to rise the way they are, we could be looking at something like that.”

In response, Cortez said the district had more proactive measures in place, as opposed to its “reactive” approach last school year when it didn’t understand COVID-19 as well.

This year, the district had staffed additional nurses in its schools and has also provided testing kits for families and staff to test at home, she said.

“We are in a very different place today than we were then,” she said. “While COVID is still very present, we are better prepared today than we were at that time.”

The district is also heading into the school year with more than 1,400 teacher vacancies as of Friday, according to its online job portal.

Safety measures

The district will not enforce universal masking when it returns to classes on Aug. 8, but the district said in a statement that it strongly recommends the use of appropriate mask-wearing during high levels of transmission.

Masks were required at the start of the 2021-2022 school year but not after Gov. Steve Sisolak lifted the statewide mask mandate in February. Sisolak said at the time that school districts could set their own policies, and the district said students and employees could make the individual choice to mask.

Federal and local public health agencies began recommending a return to mask-wearing indoors this summer after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Clark County had a high level of community spread.

Under the district’s plan, vaccinated staff and students can return to school after being exposed to COVID-19 if they are asymptomatic but must wear a mask for 10 days. If staff and students are not up to date on vaccines and are exposed to COVID-19, they must stay home for five days and continue to wear a mask for five more days upon returning to school.

The district says its contact tracing process is conducted through secured platforms and that it also relies on self-reporting from parents and staff.

Vicki Kreidel, an elementary school teacher and president of the National Education Association of Southern Nevada, said she was testing positive for more than two weeks after recently becoming sick with COVID-19.

Kreidel questioned what would happen when schools with multiple teachers and staff members were sick and there wasn’t enough staff to keep schools open.

“I fully expect COVID to spread like wildfire, because it is right now,” she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Distance learning

After more than two years, Sisolak ended the state of emergency in May, and the Nevada Department of Education informed the district that a distance learning plan was no longer required, according to Chief Strategy Officer Kellie Kowal-Paul.

Kowal-Paul said the district will continue to offer full-time distance education at the Nevada Learning Academy in accordance with Nevada law. The district will staff the learning academy based on need.

All students are eligible to enroll in the learning academy for the upcoming school year, but no other schools will offer distance learning, the district said in a statement.

If teachers become sick with COVID-19, the district said it has criteria outlined for employees based on their specific situations about whether they will be able to teach classes remotely, but did not specify the criteria.

As of October, more than 8,000 students were enrolled at the online academy. The district did not provide numbers on how many students had enrolled in the academy this year.

The number of full-time students — and the type of students — enrolled in the online learning academy has shifted dramatically since the pandemic, according to academy teacher Carmen Andrews.

Before the onset of COVID-19, Andrews said, the academy mostly was made up of students with medical issues that prevented them from attending school in person, student-athletes or students with full-time jobs who still wanted to go to school online.

“I think one of the benefits of the pandemic is that a lot of families found that online actually worked for them,” Andrews said. “While it created issues for some, it solved issues for others. Just by having that opportunity to try it out, some kids said, ‘I really like this.’ Meanwhile some parents said, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever done.’”

The last day that students can enroll in the Nevada Learning Academy is Sept. 9.

Contact Lorraine Longhi at 702-387-5298 or llonghi@reviewjournal.com. Follow her @lolonghi on Twitter.