Covid Updates
We will be updating this page as more information comes.
A Note From The School Nurse
Consider whether your child needs to see a healthcare provider and possible COVID-19 testing. CDC has a Coronavirus Self Checker available on its website, which may help you make decisions about seeking medical care for possible COVID-19 (Coronavirus Self-Checker).
Please know that every situation is different, please feel free to contact me with any questions. Thank you so much for your help keeping our school safe!
Natalie Wren, RN - School Nurse
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CDC Guidelines as of 27 April 21
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Current CDC, State, and local illness guidance for the schools:
The guidance detailed here relates only to students in K-12 school settings and is unique for two reasons:
- Children and adolescents with COVID-19 might experience different symptoms and varying symptom severity compared to adults. See “Information for Pediatric Healthcare Providers” for more information.
- K-12 schools provide essential educational, developmental, and support services to students and families. Therefore, excluding students from school has different consequences from excluding individuals from other settings. This makes the considerations for symptom screening in students in K-12 schools different from those for other settings or populations.
Based on the best available evidence at this time,
- CDC does not currently recommend schools conduct symptom screening for all students in grades K-12 on a routine (e.g., daily) basis.
- Parents, caregivers, or guardians (“caregivers”) should be strongly encouraged to monitor their children for symptoms of infectious illness every day through home-based symptom screening.
- Students who are sick should not attend school in-person.
We learn more about COVID-19 every day, and as more information becomes available, CDC will continue to update and share information. As our knowledge and understanding of COVID-19 evolves, this guidance may change.
More information available HERE.
Deciding when and how long a student should stay home
For schools and families to make informed decisions about when a student should stay home and when it’s safe for the student to return to in-person school, two questions need to be considered
- What are the student’s symptoms? and
- In what context did those symptoms occur?
Symptoms of COVID-19
People with COVID-19 have a wide range of reported symptoms – from mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19.
Symptoms can include
- Fever or chills
- Cough
- Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
- Fatigue
- Muscle or body aches
- Headache
- New loss of taste or smell
- Sore throat
- Congestion or runny nose
- Nausea or vomiting
- Diarrhea
This list does not include all possible COVID-19 symptoms. Children and adolescents with the virus that causes COVID-19 may experience any, all, or none of these symptoms.
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Symptom Screening
Symptom screening will identify only that a person might be sick, not that the person necessarily has COVID-19. There is no symptom or set of symptoms that occurs only in children diagnosed with COVID-19.[6], [7], [8], [9]
- Many symptoms of COVID-19 are also symptoms of common illnesses like cold and flu. For example, fever and cough are the most common symptoms reported in children with COVID-19 and are present with many infections. The overlap between symptoms of COVID-19 and other common infectious illnesses means that some people with COVID-19 symptoms could have something else. This could be true even more often in young children because they typically have multiple viral illnesses each year.
- Students with chronic conditions like asthma or allergies might have symptoms such as cough or nasal congestion without having an infectious illness. Children with other chronic illnesses such as those that affect the stomach or intestines (e.g., Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome) might also experience symptoms like nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea that can be confused with symptoms of COVID-19. For many students with chronic medical conditions, symptoms might reoccur frequently throughout the year.
- Because many COVID-19 symptoms are present in other illnesses, symptom screenings have the potential to exclude students from school repeatedly even though they do not have COVID-19 or another contagious illness, particularly when those screenings evaluate for multiple or all known COVID-19 symptoms.