Ellsworth School District action in a special meeting last Tuesday night brought all school buildings back for face-toface instruction on Monday.

As part of the plan, teacher workdays were added on Friday, Jan. 29 and Friday, Feb. 26, so there won’t be school those days.

Board action after a proposal from Superintendent Barry Cain and Pierce County Health Director AZ Snyder was unanimous.

The district plans to do free food service for students to reach most students in the district.

Board member Gary Kressin was pleased to see a plan where kids are back at face-to-face instruction.

“I think it’s a solid proposal, and I just want to thank you Barry and the rest of the administration team for pulling this together, and it is the right thing to do for the students,” he said.

The plan also included continued online instruction for families who choose that instructional method instead. Cain said out of about 500 high school students, 81 are learning online.

“There is some belief this may increase a bit. If you think about that, we’re about 500 students at the high school and about 81 students, so our staffs dealing with being involved in the online program itself,” said Cain.

The middle school has less than 50 online students now, and there are about 40 at the elementary level.

He said the district is dealing with COVID-19 problems with staffing every day.

“Just today we had 10 staff members out of our 200-andsome staff members that either tested positive for COVID or are close contacts. That number is a number we’re dealing with every single day,” said Cain. He noted that it would be especially troublesome if bus drivers can’t come to work.

“When it comes to bus drivers, the magic number is about two. We get more than that, and we really have to be creative,” said Cain.

Overall, he said 32 staff members have tested positive for COVID-19 during the school year.

“So that’s about 12 percent of our staff. That’s something that’s on ongoing watch, and with things like post-holiday surges, its something that we continuously monitor every day. Every single day we’re doing things, and I really have to thank a lot of people on our staff for the flexibility that they’ve shows here and that creativeness,” said Cain.

Contact tracing has been a big task.

“It’s become basically a seven day a week job in which we’re doing some elements of contact tracing. Our health department, our staff are doing a tremendous job there,” said Cain. “They’re going out of their way and really tracking that. It’s ongoing communication with families. We’re making contacts with people, finding out how it’s going and really stressing the idea that we can’t have people coming back exhibiting symptoms.”

The board was presented with district COVID-19 numbers, and Cain said they’re likely similar to other area districts.

“I don’t think any district is being able to survive without having spikes. I would say it goes up and down,” Cain said. “The fact is, there’s very few districts in the area that have the ability to have their students by physically distanced. It’s just not possible. We’re all facing the same challenge.”

Cain and Snyder stressed the need for people to quarantine for up to the two-week period if they are a close contact, even if the official quarantine times have been shortened to the 10day range.

“We want to do the 14-day quarantine. It keeps everyone else safe,” said Snyder. “We understand that school is the best place for children to be during the day, so we want to support the school district as much as possible in keeping as many students in class as we can.”

The longer quarantine times are better because that household contacts are the highest risk for infection, data shows.