Hays USD 489 Superintendent Ron Wilson gave the following statement to the school board at its Monday meeting regarding concerns about the spread of COVID-19.
We just continue to request help from our school families and the Hays community about being vigilant in following the same health and safety protocols in our community as our students and staff are being asked do at school every day.
We believe it is essential we all continue to work together as a community and be smart about our choices and actions, so we can hopefully slowdown the spread of this virus in our schools and our community. As of today, our community is over 30 percent for the seven-day average of active positive cases. Our schools have also seen a fairly significant increase in cases since our Halloween weekend. I encourage our school community and families to continue to make sacrifices, because we believe it is worth it if it means our students can remain attending in-person school and participating in school activities.
We have to continue to take COVID seriously and probably more seriously than we have at any other time this year. We are now entering the flu season, which will no doubt, along with COVID, put a tremendous strain on our school system.
We are proud that we have made a serious push for things to be as normal as possible with school, sports and other activities to this point in the school year. We are also proud of how everyone has worked together when it has come to COVID-19 with our reopening plan, the wearing of face masks, and even the reduction in our school-based quarantine period from 14 days to seven days. However, what we have noticed is when the numbers are lower and people are not getting affected by COVID specifically, people tend to let their guards down and forget this virus is not an 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. virus.
There has been a lot of hard work put in to get to this point in the school year, but we must continue to make it a priority of working together to take this thing seriously if we want to continue to remain with on-site learning for the rest of the school year.