As schools reopen this fall, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the California Department of Public Health to mandate several health and safety guidelines in schools.
“The masks will not be required outdoors,” said Principal Valerie Arbizu. “We are encouraging everybody to wear their masks when they’re not eating and drinking, but they technically won’t be required in an outdoor setting. Another big change is that we won’t be social distancing.”
The District is also providing access to everything necessary to follow mandates, including masks and hand sanitizer.
“The District made some significant investments in some of those simple things,” Arbizu said.
Moving to reopen schools fully has not been done without proper preparations for the scenario where the school may need to return to hybrid or fully distance learning due to a resurgence of the pandemic. Procedures have been under discussion for the scenario, despite doubts the situation will return to the level it was at a year ago.
“I’ll be shocked if we ever have to completely shut down,” Arbizu said, “but I can see if we got to the point where we needed to go back to a hybrid solution, we could pivot quickly to that.”
These preparations involve technology, which was the only way educators were able to conduct some semblance of a productive school year virtually. For the upcoming year, every student has been given a Chromebook. However, students can still bring personal devices on campus, the technology staff will not be able to assist with those devices.
The vaccinations will not become mandatory for students or staff until the Food and Drug Administration declares the vaccines are off emergency status. Aragon will not be excluding unvaccinated students from events and will instead search for methods to conduct events in ways that minimize virus transmission, such as holding more events outside.
“I’ll be shocked if we ever have to completely shut down”
The school will also keep track of who is interacting with whom to allow for contact tracing in the case that a student does contract COVID-19. This will be an effort to keep track of who is exposed to the virus.
“I will be asking teachers to keep track of where students are sitting,” Arbizu said. “It’s like, ‘Work with students the way you normally work with students, but keep track of who’s working with whom, who’s sitting where, so that in the event that somebody does get ill, we have an idea of where they were sitting, at least in the classrooms.’”
Variants of COVID-19, such as the delta variant, have emerged and proven to have some resistance to currently distributed vaccines. Thus, the school is implementing precautions to prevent its spread among students and staff.
“For a lot of the new variants or people that are vaccinated that then get COVID-19, a lot of the symptoms are cold-like symptoms,” said Assistant Principal Lisa Nagendran. “We are encouraging all students and all staff to stay home when they are sick.”
As of recent legislation, AB 104, it is possible to request a grade change from a letter grade to a pass or no pass mark on any student’s transcript during the 2020-2021 school year, due to the untraditional nature of the year.
“Part of the benefits of that for a student might be for academic eligibility for being able to play sports,” said Assistant Principal Nicole Elenz-Martin. “It also doesn’t affect the GPA for the student overall. Almost all of the California State Universities, UCs and several of the private schools in California are not counting it against students.”
Those looking to fill out this form can find it on the district website and linked on the Aragon homepage. The deadline for submitting the form is Monday, Aug. 16.
