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Bartlesville Public Schools has updated its COVID-19 close contact quarantine procedures and adopted a new external standalone trigger for district-wide Distance Learning.

The district has adopted the new quarantine protocols from the Centers for Disease Control, which reduce the self-quarantine period after close contact with someone with COVID-19 from 14 days to 10 days. Previously there was no way to shorten the quarantine period, but now if a test sample taken on day 6 or day 7 of a quarantine is negative, the quarantine will end after day 7. None of this affects the unchanged 10-day isolation period for someone who tests positive for COVID-19; these changes are only for close contact quarantines.

For several months the district has tracked its staffing, the number and frequency of site-level positive cases and close contact quarantines, and overall site absenteeism. Those metrics are used to determine if a site would need to transition to Distance Learning, but the district's safety protocols and contact tracing have successfully managed the above school-specific measures such that only one site-based closure has been needed for one day early on in the school year.

However, the district recognizes that in the coming weeks a surge of cases related to Thanksgiving and later winter events will arrive, further straining our hospitals.

To help protect students and their families, along with staff members, during times of high community spread and overburdened hospitals, the district will schedule and later announce a transition to district-wide Distance Learning if the following criteria are met simultaneously for three consecutive days:

• the seven-day rolling average of the City of Bartlesville's COVID-19 new cases is in the “red zone” of over 50/100,000 (please note that is for the city, not Washington County)
• while both the Northeast and Tulsa regions of the state’s hospital surge plan are in “Tier 4 status” with over 40-percent of staffed hospital beds with patients who are COVID-19 positive

The district publicly tracks that data and other metrics on its COVID-19 Resources page at bpslearn.com.

Due to the safety concerns from high community spread and health care impacts, all district extracurricular activities, including spectator sports, assemblies, and performances, would be suspended during a district-wide Distance Learning period initiated by that standalone trigger. That is distinct from site-based Distance Learning periods in which extracurricular activities could proceed in the absence of concerns about a super-spreader event.