Since school started on Sept. 14, staff and officials in the secondary school building have noticed that the students are quieter than usual School Superintendent David Foster noted at Monday night’s board of education meeting.
“It could be because there are fewer students passing in the hallways,” Foster said, “Socially it is a lot different for the students. They seem kind of subdued.”
Students in the secondary school are attending a hybrid style of school with the total population divided into two groups, who are each in-school two days a week and online three days a week.
Foster also explained that the district has installed a new system for taking temperatures of all the students entering the building, using an infra-red system that has a wide range for detecting elevated temperatures.
“It is a passive system which detects if a student in the group has an elevated temperature. This way we don’t have to gun them all,” he said.
When asked how the students are complying with wearing masks, Foster said, “Pretty well,” while Principal Maryellen O’Connell chimed in, “very well.”
“I credit it to the fact that they know that if they don’t wear a mask, they’re not coming to school here,” Foster said, “They seem to have accepted the fact with no animosity.”
He added that while the school can offer masks to the students, most students bring their own.
The same rules of propriety that apply to T-shirts, he said applies to masks.
“We don’t allow inappropriate T-shirts and the students know that the same rules apply to masks,” he said.
“There have been zero issues with the students wearing masks,” said O’Connell.
” I have never seen the students quite as motivated to be here as they are now,” said Foster.
Mask wearing throughout the school day was one of the concerns broached by parents during the district’s planning stages for reopening of school.
“We’re doing our best to keep everyone healthy and it’s the same for the parents. We feel very fortunate. We want to keep school in school as long as we can but one day or another, on one campus or the other we’re going to have to close the school sometime due to an exposure,” he said.
The Superintendent said that if school must close due to an exposure it will be for 24 hours, after which cleaning will take another 24-hours before students can return to school. “In between that were doing contact tracing,” he said.
