ST. GEORGE —With the number of COVID-19 cases at Washington County schools abating, Superintendent Larry Bergeson debriefed attendees at Tuesday’s board meeting on how the district has managed to weather the storm and keep schools open.
Throughout the pandemic, the Utah Department of Health has released daily reports on the number of COVID-19 cases in the state. This includes infections among students at various districts in Utah, broken down by school site.
As of Wednesday, no local schools were in the yellow or red category – signifying 15-29 cases and 30 or more, respectively.
This is a change from Jan. 27, for instance, when three Washington County high schools were on a red alert, with Snow Canyon and Pine View tied for a district-high with 37 COVID-19 cases each. That same day, eight other schools were cited as being in a yellow alert.
“We are just finishing two years of the pandemic,” Bergeson said. “In March of 2020, everything shut down when the COVID virus hit. We weren’t certain what we were doing, for sure. We went virtual, remote, so we did all we could to try and educate kids virtually.”
He said he believes those early months of the pandemic were particularly revealing.
“If there’s anything we learned from this experience, it was that nothing replaces in-person school with kids in front of a teacher, for a lot of reasons: socially, emotionally, academically, so parents can work and a lot of other things,” Bergeson said.
He expressed appreciation for the support that teachers, employees, parents and especially students gave the board when it came to making “some very bold decisions.”
This included the re-opening of local schools in fall of 2020. Bergeson noted that Washington County School District was the first district to reopen in the state of Utah and among the first in the country. The statement was greeted with hearty applause by the standing-room-only crowd.
“And we’ve moved forward with those decisions to keep kids in school,” he said. “There are a lot of adjustments that we had to make – just teachers showing up was a big deal. If we would have been faced with teachers striking and not coming to school, we would have gone virtual.”
Bergeson said masks, which were mandatory for all district students and employees through May 2021, were unpopular but were necessary at the time to conduct in-person schooling.
“I’ve said from the beginning, I wasn’t a fan of them (masks) either,” he said. “We wore them … and we kept kids in school, which is the most critical thing to do: what’s best for kids. The health department supported those decisions.”
It’s been a challenging time for everyone, Bergeson said.
“There was an enormous amount of work and effort (put into) trying to keep kids safe, trying to keep employees safe, keep buses running – just to keep bus drivers, as we had those who had compromised health conditions and couldn’t work or who were sick and couldn’t work,” he said. “And that’s happened right through this latest omicron variant.”
Bergeson said the number of students and staff coming down with omicron this year has been significantly higher than the number of those who fell ill during the original COVID-19 surge or during the course of the delta variant.
“As we dealt with that, we kept schools open in-person. And our achievement scores, though they’re not perfect, are among the best in the state, the best in the nation, for that matter,” he said. “And Utah did the best of any state at keeping school going. So we’re grateful for that.”
Bergeson then informed the crowd that illness among staff and students has dropped significantly, so much so that daily absences are “back to where they’re almost the normal number we would experience.” He said the district is “sitting in a very good position.”
“Basically, my announcement is we’re just going on with business as usual,” he said. “We’re being frugal, smart, we’re responding intelligently to those things we’ll be faced with as we finish the school year.”
Bergeson acknowledged the reality that COVID was likely going to be endemic, but that as the world – and specifically Washington County – enter that phase, “we’ll be able to just carry on and continue to do the quality work that our teachers do in the classrooms and support you as students and you as parents in the community.”
Bergeson took one more moment to laud the way everyone in the district has worked together during an unprecedented time.
“We really do work hard to do what’s best for kids, in all facets.”
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