Important Parent Notification – important procedures as students return to school
- DAILY: Families are required to pre-screen your child(ren) for illness prior to sending to school daily. Please take your child(ren)’s temperature to ensure it is below 100.4 (without the use of fever reducing medications) before sending your child(ren) to school. Students should not attend school until fever-free for 24 hours.
In accordance with CDC guidelines, contact a healthcare provider immediately if your child has: have a fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath/difficulty breathing, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion or runny nose, nausea or vomiting, diarrhea. (
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html)
- Reporting positive COVID cases: If your child, or someone in your household receives a positive COVID-19 test or was in close contact with someone who has tested positive, please notify your child(ren)’s school asap. CDC is defining close contact as being within 6 feet of the person for more than 15 minutes, with or without a face covering.
If a student is on school grounds when school personnel are notified of their positive COVID-19 status, or a student is showing symptoms of COVID-19, they will remain isolated until a parent/guardian is able to pick them up from school.
Please provide school with the documentation of the positive test results you received from your healthcare provider or public health. This information supports our contact tracing process.
- Our contact tracing process: Upon notification from either the public health department or parent/guardian, the following steps will either be done by WDCSD or Dubuque County Public Health:
- Record the name of the student who tested positive
- Record date of test
- Record parent/guardian contact and/or public health contact
- Record and contact school buildings of household members if household members are students in our district
- Record eligible return date of positive student
- Reference all seating charts from each classroom, lunch, activities, or other school-related-areas for direct exposure list
- Record and contact transportation office if positive student is a bus rider – transportation office make those direct exposure contacts
- Make all direct exposure contacts – communicate to pick up student asap and home/self-isolate for 14 days from date of last exposure before returning to school (symptom free)
- You may also be contacted by Dubuque County Public Health in addition to our communication
- Receiving calls for direct exposure: Each school will do what they can to control the spread of COVID-19, however, your child may be in direct contact with another student testing positive with COVID at any given time.
If/when receiving a call stating that your child has been in direct contact, please know that we legally cannot disclose the positive student’s name or any specific information.
If receiving this call, your child will then need to home/self-isolate 14 days from exposure date before returning to school. During this time, the CDC recommends you monitor daily for symptoms; temperature check twice a day as well as monitoring for any other symptoms; if symptoms arise, contact a healthcare provider immediately.
If your child was not in close contact, as defined by the CDC within 6 feet for longer than 15 minutes, with a positive case in the class or building, you will not be contacted.
In cases of secondary/indirect exposure*, your child will not be asked to home/self-isolate and is able to attend school; your child will only be asked to home isolate in instances of direct contact. (example – you have multiple children in our schools, you get a call that child 1 has had direct exposure to a positive case, child 2 and child 3 are still able to attend school while child 1 will be asked to home/self-isolate and not attend school). *Secondary/Indirect exposure: someone in your household was subject to direct contact to a positive case, but the rest of your household was not in direct contact with that positive case)
- Student in home/self-isolation: If your child is required to home/self-isolate, but healthy enough to continue with academic learning, they will access their education through itslearning as a virtual student. All virtual student guidelines previously communicated will apply during this time.
After completing form, you can pick up the device at the district office located at 310 4th St SW in Farley. If device is checked out for a 14-day home/self-isolation, devices must be returned to the District Office in Farley or returned to your child’s building and given to the building’s secretary upon returning to school.
- Monitoring for trends/larger closures: Our administrative team will evaluate the number of cases and exposures in each building and mitigation efforts daily. Constant changes and adjustments will be made throughout buildings to continue to keep our focus on providing the best educational environments we can during a continued pandemic. Please look for updates to come to you in emails and be posted on the district website as needed.
- Thank you for your continued patience, support, understanding, and trust in Western Dubuque Community Schools. We are all in this together and on the same team, and we will continue to be better every day together.