Dear Staff, Students, and Families,
Win-E-Mac School has been notified of 3 positive COVID-19 people in our school community.
Our contact tracing is complete and all close contacts (within 6 feet for greater than 15 minutes) have been identified. If you or your family did not receive a phone call from the school, you were not deemed a close contact. Only those who were considered close contacts received phone calls with follow-up emails containing instructions on the next steps.
Case specifics are confidential, only those needing to know specific information were given any details. Close contacts do not get any case-specific details.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to Kevin McKeever, Randy Bruer, or Polk County Public Health at (218) 281-3385.
Sincerely,
Kevin McKeever, Principal
Randy Bruer, Superintendent
Additional Information
Our numbers in the state along with our Polk County numbers continue to grow aggressively. Please practice safety so we can keep our school and programs working. To date, we have had 4 positive cases with another 3 added today, making it a total of 7 cases. The latest cases as of today have been home under quarantine for some time and will not affect the operations of the school. We will see more school cases arise as the year moves forward. We closely watch the numbers of employees absent due to the virus and the number of students absent in our school. Our school district needs to take into account not only the county-level case data when determining learning models, but also the number of confirmed cases, quarantines, and close contacts in our school community, within our district, and other data such as individuals with influenza-like illness.
This is what we are calling the “scalpel approach.” This approach allows school districts and charter schools within the same county to have different learning models. For example, our county has 7 school districts within its boundaries, which would give them all the same county base data; however, when each school district reviews their community data and school data, their viral spread might be vastly different. As a result, some of the districts in our county may need to move to distance learning while others can remain in hybrid.
Beyond this, some districts may have local factors or mitigation strategies that allow or prohibit students from accessing learning in person. This scalpel approach is why some school districts that have high county-level case data are still operating in an in-person or hybrid learning model. Activities and athletics have always been part of the conversation when considering learning models.
We are not moving to another model of learning yet, but I would like parents to make plans in case this could happen. With high numbers in our county and in the district, we need to be cognizant that our school could move to another model sooner than later.