As the number of COVID-19 cases surges in Knox County, Mount Vernon city schools have not experienced any major outbreaks, Superintendent William Seder told the Mount Vernon News.
“We’re doing pretty well,” Seder said. “We have eight active student cases at this point in time — case positives. We have five active staff cases as of today that are positive.”
The school system has 3,800 students and 550 staff members.
“Right now we are about 0.21% for students testing positive and about 0.92% for active staff,” Seder said. “That’s a good marker for us.” Through contact tracing, the school system has determined that the cases “are coming from outside the school; it’s coming from family gatherings, from different types of events that take place outside of the school system, things that we can’t control.”
Students or staff who test positive are not allowed to return to school for at least 10 days.
“If they are symptom-free, they can come back on day 11,” the superintendent said. Inside the schools, students and staff must wear face masks and are allowed to remove them only at lunch or outside at recess.
The school system still offers online learning, with about 400 students participating, Seder said. That has dropped from about 750 students at the beginning of the year. In the fall, however, COVID-19 cases were not increasing at the rate they did during November.
“It will be interesting to see where we are relative to cases as we go through December and January, and how many people will opt to stay in school or go to our online digital academy,” he said. “If we need to make adjustments, we’re ready to do that if we have to.”
Seder noted that the prospect of a COVID-19 vaccine is encouraging, but it likely won’t make its way to the school system until January at the earliest.
“We continue to share the message about wearing face masks, social distancing, and washing your hands and all of those things that we’ve gotten so accustomed to,” he said. “We can’t just stop those things because there is a vaccine on the horizon. We’ve got to continue to do that due diligence.”
