Lewis County will disperse half a million dollars to public school districts in order to help them continue efforts to reopen safely — something the county has prioritized since the beginning of the school year. The lump sum is about a third of what the county received from the Department of Health earlier this fall for its COVID-19 response, and although school districts submitted requests to the county, officials decided funds will be distributed based on population — $40 per student — leaving it up to each district to decide how to spend it.
“It really made the most sense to allocate it per student and to then let them choose what was the most pressing need,” Public Health Director J.P. Anderson said Monday. “Our county, having worked to open schools in-person, really needs to support with the funds to make sure that can be done as safely as possible.”
In ongoing conversations between superintendents, pediatricians, and the county’s infection prevention consultant group, IPAC, Anderson said he’s still hearing about schools working to get HEPA air purifiers into classrooms, retrofitting water fountains into bottle-fillers, and continuing to buy sanitation supplies.
“I didn’t want them to choose between picking the top-tier cleaning product or trying to make something stretch longer,” he said.
Schools have already made huge adjustments to their models with the help of IPAC, which conducted walk-throughs and regularly works with superintendents. But many are also gearing up for the return of high school students, who local health officials recommended to return on Dec. 14. The addition of older students will present even more financial and logistical challenges to maintaining safe schools.
“There’s so many different layers,” Adna Elementary Principal Lisa Dallas said. “When somebody says ‘oh, so stay 6 feet apart and wear a mask,’ that’s part of it, but there’s so much more.”
Dallas described the UV light wand staff uses to sanitize the library as groups of students rotate through. Then there’s the thermometers, PPE, and face shields they acquired with the help of the county’s emergency management deputy director Andy Caldwell. And safety precautions go beyond new equipment. Younger kids now need more supervision to maintain 6 feet of distance — at recess, the elementary school requires a 16:1 student-to-staff ratio, which often requires teachers to get “creative,” Dallas said.
And the safety measures are adding up.
“I think we know that schools are always operating on very small margins as far as having extra money,” Anderson said.
Dallas said it’s “absolutely” stretching them thin, especially as more families opt to homeschool, pulling their kids from public schools entirely and consequently squeezing districts’ federal funding. Districts adjust their budgets regularly throughout the year, and will see numbers tighten if student registration decreases.
“We support their decision, but it does leave us with less students,” Dallas said.
With the new funding, Dallas said the school may consider adding another bus route. Earlier this year, when the elementary school operated on a split-day model — some kids arriving in the morning and the others in the afternoon — school buses were sparsely populated. Now, all in-person students file in at one time. But the newly-announced funding from the county could pay for another route or another bus driver to ensure proper distancing.
County officials are now working to distribute the funding, and plan on keeping a $50,000 pool on hand for any “emergent needs” that schools may have now until the end of the year, when the money needs to be spent.
