Health board offers update on school readiness

FAYETTEVILLE — Staying a safe distance apart will serve a crucial role in preventing the spread of the coronavirus, as will wearing a mask, once schools resume in-person classes, members of Fayetteville’s Board of Health said Wednesday.

Schools will have options if cases break out, said Marti Sharkey, the city’s public health officer. Individual classrooms or schools could close, or certain levels of a school building, she said.

However, a districtwide shuttering of in-person learning would require state approval, Sharkey said. The board sent the school district a set of recommendations the district could use to determine if such a move becomes necessary, she said.

“They really want us to be their backbone for when they say, ‘OK, our local board of health is saying we need to do this,’ when they go to the state,” Sharkey said.

So far, there’s no capacity to test for the virus in schools, she said.

Hershey Garner, board chairman, said he worried about how quickly schools will know about any positive cases.

“My concern is we’re not going to pick up those positives for a week or 10 days due to our poor testing,” Garner said.

The University of Arkansas has spent months setting up classrooms to allow students learning on-campus to stay at least 6 feet apart, with assigned seats and a mask mandate, said Huda Sharaf, medical director at the Pat Walker Health Center. School districts need to try to follow the same model, she said.

“Even if they all manage to wear their masks all the time, you’re going to end up having one positive person in a crowded classroom, and you’re going to have to quarantine the entire classroom plus the teacher,” Sharaf said.

The district developed a few options for parents to choose after the state recently mandated all districts must offer five-day-a-week, in-person classes. Parents could choose the everyday, in-person option; two on-site days and three online days; four on-site days and one online day; or five online days. The deadline for parents to choose was Tuesday.

Sharkey said the board should know soon how many parents chose which option. Board members, most of whom are physicians with patients who have children attending Fayetteville schools, said they had been hearing many parents were choosing the five-day-a-week, in-person learning option.

“That’s certainly going to be a catastrophe with social distancing,” Garner said.