COVID numbers close to dropping below threshold to allow Stephens County School System to return to normal operations

The Stephens County Board of Education met on Tuesday for its Regular Scheduled meeting. During the meeting, Stephens County Schools Deputy Superintendent Matt Thompson provided the Board with a COVID update.

Thompson says the school system continues to see a decline in active cases of COVID-19.

He says the system is close to reaching the threshold that would allow them to go back to normal operations, rather than continue its current COVID-19 Mitigation plan.

“We had a total of 3 student cases last week, the whole week. You’ll remember at one time we had as many as 69 cases in a single week. We had 3 student cases and one staff case. Community spread has dropped considerably and we’re actually getting fairly close to our threshold where we drop below and go back to normal operations. We’re not there yet, but we probably will in the next week or two. But the trends all look positive. So things are going extremely well in the COVID front and we just hope they stay that way,” he said.

As Thompson said, when the school system reaches the threshold to return to normal operations, the schools will be open for all students Monday through Friday on a normal schedule.

Vice Chair Rod Moore thanked everyone for taking the steps to keep the spread of COVID-19 down.

Chairman Jim Bellamy asked about the number of students in quarantine.

Thompson explained that it’s been several weeks since a group of students had to be in quarantine.

“We haven’t had any quarantine clusters in the last two weeks. We had 10 students who were close contacts and we called their parents to monitor them last week, but we haven’t had any clusters that necessitates quarantines,” he said.

As of today, October 21, the School System has yet to return to its normal operations. If the number of COVID cases continue to decline, and the school system returns to normal operations, WNEG News will announce that decision.