COVID Notifications and Quarantine Guidance Update

Dear Parents of Lake County School District Students,

Over the past few weeks, the Lake County community has experienced a higher transmission rate of COVID positive cases. The school district has continued to put into place measures to increase our response to keeping students and staff healthy such as increasing the custodial cleaning care in our buildings, continued expectations around mask wearing, and encouraging social distance in appropriate settings. Each school has also implemented school specific actions to encourage healthy measures. 

We have appreciated the response that each of you have taken to be proactive in either communicating with us a positive case in your home, keeping your child(ren) home when they have had symptoms of illness, or testing for COVID before returning to school if your child has had an identified close contact exposure. Thank you!

As the number of cases in our community have risen, we have currently been working on communicating each identified close contact or possible exposure with individualized letters. At this time, and while community transmission rates remain high in our county, we are going to discontinue the sending of these individualized letters. Being in any public space in our community at this time with transmission rates at their current level means you are more than likely in close contact or potentially exposed situations to COVID and should be diligent in monitoring for symptoms. Not sending the personalized letters means we will be able to shift our resources to better tracking the known cases within our school community and monitoring and supporting staff and students in their absence and return to school. We appreciate your understanding.

We believe it is also important to explain why at this time the district is not implementing the recommended post 5-day return for vaccinated students. With the new guidance, we would be required to continually collect updated vaccination status of students, apply individualized return dates of students based on this information and dates of onset which would not be consistent for our student body. Additionally we would need to set up systems in school to ensure that students who are in their days 6-10 quarantine were masked throughout the day or separated during times that masks could not be worn, such as lunch, and in ways that would not leave a student feeling singled out or punitive. We’ve been running through systems for how we might accomplish this and at this time the resources required to implement systems would be taxing on our staff. We are already experiencing staffing challenges to keep up with our current level of operations and would be concerned about the impacts to staffing this measure would have at this time. We recognize that many families would like to take advantage of this guidance change, yet we appreciate your understanding that at this time we have paused the consideration of this guidance to focus our current staffing needs and on maintaining our current level of operations.

Thank you again for your continued support and diligence in responding to the changing COVID considerations we continue to face. We believe that as a result of everyone’s contributions toward this effort we have been able to offer a much more stable school experience for our students this year, and for that we are grateful!

Thank you, 

Lake County School District