The Garretson School District will be starting classes on Thursday, August 19, with an in-person option only.
During the 2020-21 school year, several changes were made due to the pandemic, including a virtual option, required masking, and non-group learning. While the mitigation measures made school difficult for both teachers and students, the district was largely successful in keeping cases of COVID from affecting the district as a whole. The school did not have to close its doors due to a shortage of staff, students, or widespread transmission, even during South Dakota's peak months of October, November, and December. The district reported that most of their cases of student-to-student transmission were outside of the classroom.
During the spring, when vaccinations became available to them, most of the teachers and staff opted to receive their shots at a school-held vaccination clinic. Cases of COVID-19 plummeted in Minnehaha County and South Dakota as a whole, giving hope to the Garretson School Board and administration that the pandemic would be behind the community when school began again in the fall.
At that time, the board and Superintendent Guy Johnson opted to return to a nearly normal state for the 2021-22 school year, opening the building back up to public events and allowing masking to be optional.
The reduction in mitigation techniques has worried some in the Garretson School District, with parents questioning whether a masks optional policy is the best call.
"All of our summer programs and such have been run with masks optional and barring changes from Federal or State mandates, that is the intent for the coming year," wrote Garretson School Board president Shannon Nordstrom on July 26.
As of July 27, the CDC again began recommending masking indoors for large groups in areas with high transmission, and universal masking for teachers, students, and staff in schools, regardless of vaccination status.
The vaccine will also not be mandated. When questioned via Facebook if a virtual option would be opened again should vaccines become mandatory, Nordstrom answered, "Slightly political answer but I can only speak on behalf of the board for what we have decided, not on scenarios that have not happened. We are always monitoring changes but at this point we have our path determined as described."
The summer started with a breath of relief as cases in the United States continued to decrease. In South Dakota, diagnosed cases fell to less than twenty per day, and remained there until mid-July. This is a significant difference from the beginning of the year, when the state was seeing anywhere from 115 to 337 new cases per day.
Recently, the trend appears to be backsliding. Over the past two weeks, the number of daily new diagnoses has gone back over 30-40 per day, with 52 new cases announced on July 26 (the most recent date released by the SD Department of Health as of Tuesday). Much of the increase is being attributed to the spread of the Delta variant as well as a relaxation of mitigation factors, especially among younger people. Those aged 18-49 are also the least likely to be vaccinated, with many believing that the virus will not affect them as badly as it has those age 50 and up.
Vaccinations have been shown to nearly eliminate hospital stays and death in those who have received it. The SD Dept of Health reports 58% of the South Dakota population aged 12 or older have received at least one shot, and the state has been administering just over 1,000 new vaccines per week.
Youth under age 12 do not yet qualify to receive the vaccine, which means they are relying on others to help protect them from acquiring COVID-19.
Pfizer, the vaccine most likely to seek FDA authorization first, expects to see its final trial results at the end of September, and will potentially be seeking to administer vaccines to those age 6 and up toward the beginning of October.
This means the fall semester will see few elementary students with vaccine protection. In conjunction with the other factors, epidemiologists and public health experts are worried that cases will explode among school-aged youth. Cases among people in states with low-vaccination rates have already seen an increase in cases and hospitalizations that rival the numbers from this past winter, when healthcare systems were overwhelmed.
The effects of COVID-19 may be long-lasting, with approximately 30% of those infected having long-term adverse effects, even among those who only experienced minor symptoms, according to the University of Washington.
