Students in the Windsor Unified School District (WUSD) returned to in-person hybrid learning on April 5, but with not even a week back in school, multiple COVID cases have popped up, prompting the activation of the district’s COVID response team, and sending some staff and students back into distance learning.
According to Julián Rivera, the district’s pandemic response coordinator, last week the district had three positive cases of COVID-19 among its students.
“It impacted a handful of our classrooms and resulted in 48 students and five teachers being sent home for 10 days,” he said in an email. “All of them received clear guidelines to stay on distance learning in the meantime. They are going to have to stay in quarantine for a minimum of 10 days and submit a negative COVID-19 test to come back to school. These measures were taken so everyone impacted by these exposures may come back to in-person education safely, as soon as possible.”
Rivera then outlined the steps the district took in the wake of the cases. “In terms of protocols, we activated our COVID response team which is staffed by our amazing frontline nurses and health team,” Rivera said. “The teachers and students exposed were promptly informed and confidentiality was maintained. Our COVID response team has been working closely with Sonoma County Public Health throughout the pandemic and continues to do so.”
According to parents on social media, the impacted campuses included Windsor Middle School and Mattie Washburn Elementary, however, Rivera declined to name the affected campuses. Additional details were not available due to privacy concerns.
“This is new territory for all of us and it is important that we protect the identities of those affected by this unfortunate event to prevent COVID-19 stigma,” Rivera said. “WUSD is committed to providing safe in-person education to all of our students while we help contain the spread of this deadly virus in our community.”
A full explanation of all of the district’s COVID-related plans and measures, go to: https://sites.google.com/wusd.org/covid19/home. The information is available in English and Spanish.
