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Dear Friends and Neighbors,
Today will be another brief newsletter to update you on the latest guidance on schools returning to in-person classroom instruction, which the Oregon Department of Education released today.
First, let’s all acknowledge the difficulties that students, families and teachers have been experiencing for the last 10 months. Educators have rightfully pushed for increased safety measures to ensure that a return to the classroom doesn’t contribute to an increased spread of COVID-19. And parents are rightfully concerned about the impact on their children.
I know how desperately some students want to return to the classroom. The consequences of this pandemic have been incredibly severe, including an increase in concerns around children’s mental health, which KGW has covered here. My hope is that the impending return to some in-person instruction will give students a safe space to learn and grow that they have been lacking for so long.
The full 90-page guidance from the Oregon Department of Education can be found here (the updates are in green italics). The Oregonian covered the news here, featuring more details on metrics that have changed.
The key changes in the updated guidance include:
- School district decision-making. Governor Brown returned the decisions for operating schools in-person to the local level on January 1, 2021. This guidance provides local leaders with guidance, information, and resources they need to make informed decisions.
- Updated advisory metrics aligned to the Harvard Global Health Institute recommendations. These metrics allow for a return to in-person instruction for elementary students at higher levels of community case rates than previously recommended.
- A new requirement that when students and staff return to in-person instruction out of alignment with the metrics, schools must offer access to on-site COVID-19 testing for symptomatic students and staff identified on campus as well as those with known exposure to individuals with COVID-19.
- Multiple new resources to support learning outside, field trips, equitable grading practices, attendance best practices, contact tracing partnerships, COVID-19 testing, and more.
As school districts make decisions about returning to in-person instruction, they must focus on two factors:
- It remains important that the community case counts (or case rates) are low enough that the community is not regularly introducing new COVID-19 cases into schools. The county metrics remain the best tool for determining when cases are down enough to return to in-person instruction.
- The ability to implement public health and safety protocols in schools remains important. Oregon’s guidance is comprehensive and includes diligent entry screening, universal use of face coverings, physical distancing, cohorting, frequent handwashing, and over 160 other requirements for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
- The Oregon Health Authority reported 637 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the statewide total of new and presumptive cases to 134,468. The OHA also reported five more deaths, meaning 1,808 Oregonians have died of the coronavirus. You can click the images below for links to interactive data tables about coronavirus in Oregon. Please note that the numbers in the first graphic include data collected over multiple days from the long holiday weekend.
To read past newsletters, you can go to this link. For up to date information, please check this link to the Oregon Health Authority where regular updates are posted: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ERD/Pages/News-Releases.aspx
Please email me at Rep.TinaKotek@oregonlegislature.gov if you have specific concerns that have not been addressed by the OHA. Our office will do all we can to help and protect all Oregonians.
Thank you for reading! We will get through this together.
Best,
Tina Kotek
State Representative
House District 44
Speaker of the House
email: Rep.TinaKotek@oregonlegislature.gov I phone: 503-986-1200
address: 900 Court St NE, H-269, Salem, OR 97301
website: http://www.oregonlegislature.gov/kotek
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