OSWEGO – After a lengthy process filled with discussion with parents, community members and health experts, the Oswego City School District will require students, staff and visitors to wear masks while inside.
The decision, which was announced in the district’s Reopening Plan, was worked on since the end of the 2020-21 school year, taking into account guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the New York State Department of Education, the Oswego County Department of Health and the district’s medical director, Dr. Bob Morgan of Oswego Health.
“At the beginning of the summer our local health department put out some guidance, so we were reviewing that guidance, and then just recently, last Friday the commissioner shared with us some additional guidance,” Superintendent Mathis Calvin III said. “We’ve been listening and reading, trying to understand.”
Calvin emphasized the importance of communicating with the community and parents as well as those health officials to gauge their concerns when it came to the 2021-22 school year. These concerns ranged beyond requirements for masks, as many wanted to see their children in school buildings five days a week.
“The first thing we heard from our parents loud and clear was that parents really wanted to see kids in school five days a week,” Calvin said. “They told us, ‘We want kids in school five days a week. However you do it, get them in because they’re missing a lot.’ Parents also told us they wanted us to make sure we kept their kids healthy and safe while they are in school, that we made sure we did whatever possible to keep kids safe.”
Other concerns included the need for technology like WiFi and Chromebooks, access to breakfast and lunch, as well as assistance with social-emotional troubles endured over the last two years, as Calvin explained.
In order to keep their children safe, the district decided to require masks for everyone inside school buildings. Making sure children are back to in-person learning was a top priority for the district to mitigate the learning gap experienced at all grade levels since the pandemic began.
“Think about a kindergartener, a first grader, a third grader, those are some really critical development years,” Calvin said. “Every year children go to school is critical, but when you look for example at the early childhood years, learning how to hold a pencil, learning how to write, learning how to read, learning one-to-one correspondence with mathematics. Doing that virtually poses challenges. It makes the learning process difficult.”
Despite the desire for in-person learning, students with medical exemptions will have the opportunity to learn in an online format. Parents will need to provide the district with medical documentation by August 22 to see if their child can get the exemption, which will offer him or her “tutorial services,” as Calvin described them, as well as learning in a virtual manner.
Ultimately, the district’s goal is to “maintain the health and safety” of its students, as Calvin said. With that in mind, the district felt masks were the best way to do that for everyone.
“I’ve always been a person who does believe in offering opportunities for people to exercise choice when possible. We are in an unprecedented time,” Calvin said. “We now have a situation where we have a variant, and we are also finding ourselves as a district in a county that has been designated with high rates of transmission. We have very few in our schools right now in terms of children that are vaccinated at this time or who can even be vaccinated. The risks are extremely high not only for students but staff and visitors. Given all the risks that are involved and the district’s need to ensure that we protect and that we do everything we can to maintain the safety of our students and community, at this time I believe this is the right choice.”
Calvin backed the decision by adding that guidance from the CDC and the commissioner of education both state that there is a need for people to wear masks. While this is the case now, Calvin said that the district would “do [their] best to release those protocols when possible,” as he referenced a regression of COVID-19 transmission rates.
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