This information is from FRCS School Nurse, Lori O’Keefe. It is intended to help the school remain open for in-class instruction throughout the year. Parents, please do your best to help us in these areas. And if you have questions, please email Lori at .
If your child is sick, please keep them home
There are a number of reasons students may feel unwell for a day and are perfectly fine to return to school the next day. If, however, symptoms worsen over the course of the day, and you anticipate they will have symptoms longer than 48hours, I recommend testing them. Technically, you have 48 hours for symptoms to resolve before you are required to test, but you can save yourself a few days of missed school by going earlier. If you choose not to test, your child cannot return to school until after the required 10 days from symptom onset.
If you test, keep other children home
If you take your child for testing, please keep your other children home from school. This is what saved us last year. COVID is extremely contagious. In order to avoid a class or close-contact quarantine, we need to build in a 48 hour window from when your child was here at school and when symptoms start. If it is more than 48 hours, we do not have to quarantine other students. This is why keeping siblings who may have already been exposed by their brother/sister at home is essential. It often results in only one class being quarantined instead of two or three. I guarantee that your children were in school many more days last year than they might have been because of the parents who partnered with us to do this. Yes, it may be inconvenient, but we will all benefit from this.
When to contact me
If your child’s symptoms begin outside of school hours, and you are unsure what to do or have questions, keep them home and email me at . I will respond by 9am (after drop off) and help you navigate next steps. This allows me to protect my family time in the evenings. Do not bring them to school until they have been cleared to be here. Your child may miss an hour or so of school, but we will do our best to get them back as soon as possible. If you receive a positive COVID result for your child, please notify me right away as we may have quarantines to issue. If someone in your home tests positive (who is not a student here) or your child has an outside exposure, keep them home, and email me. I will address it as soon as possible during school hours.
On quarantines
You may be hearing that other schools are not quarantining; this is true. If they follow the mask mandate and all parties are masked, they are not required to quarantine close contacts but can instead isolate COVID-positive students. This does not mean that if your student is masked, he/she doesn’t have to quarantine. All students must mask for this to apply. However, if we have proof of vaccination or a COVID positive result for your student, he/she will not be quarantined.
As always, please reach out with questions and concerns. This is an ever-changing situation and communication with us helps us keep all students and faculty safe and in-person.
