As the summer comes to an end and school is about to begin, the staff at the Doddridge County Schools are hard at work, getting ready for classes to begin.
Parents have already been notified as to who will need to wear the masks and when, how “the plan” will control the groups and the size of the groups, how the students will be “socially distanced” while eating and every other possibility in the schools.
But beyond that… What actions to prevent the Covid from spreading should there happen to be a student/teacher/administrator who comes to school infected?
The first line of defense is at the bus level. The BOE has purchased ten steam cleaners that are to be used to clean the buses by the bus drivers once every 24 hours after hard surface cleaning.
When the students and teachers arrive at school, they will walk through the entry that will scan each person for elevated temperatures. If a student is found to have a temperature above 100.4 F, they will be quarantined in a room right off the entry, avoiding infecting others in the school, and the school nurse, after their examination for other symptoms, will contact the parent/guardian to pick the child up.
With that in mind, the BOE has hired a third School Nurse so each school would have their own nurse and not be dragging germs from one school to another.
The office area is now outfitted with plexiglass cough guards to protect both the students and office staff.
Another level of prevention is the specialized water fountains that fills the water bottles with a no touch filling system. Originally purchased last year to cut back on the number of plastic bottles being disposed of in the schools, the administrators have covered over the old fashioned part of the water fountain and left the water bottle filler that the students do not need to touch in any way to fill their water bottles.
Add to that, they have added portable hand washing stations that can be placed in the hallways, that will prevent the student’s need to go to the bathrooms for hand washing prior to eating or when changing classes. These stations are foot pedal driven so that those using them will not be required to touch the surfaces before, after during hand washing.
The BOE has also hired a permanent substitute Custodian who will be at the school doing hard cleaning of surfaces at least 3 times a day while the school is in session.
For deep cleaning, an outside company has been hired to go into all of the schools on Fridays to disinfect all hard surface and perform an electrostatic cleaning.
With all of that being said, since COVID-19 is said to be transmitted through the droplets in the air, the BOE has purchased what is called an I Wave System that is an Ion Purification System that will be placed on every Heating/Air Conditioning unit in the school system to provide recycled clean air every 30 minutes in each of the buildings.
All of the above preventive measures will also prevent other airborne illnesses throughout this year and many years into the future.