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Date: 1/17/2022
BELCHERTOWN – After months of going back and forth on vaccine requirements to testing requirements for extracurricular activities, the Belchertown School Committee passed the second and final reading of a policy during its Jan. 11 meeting that would require athletes to be tested weekly to participate in sporting events.
After committee member Michael Knapp brought up a question about using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests to be eligible for participation, committee Chair Heidi Gutekenst said it would not be a problem.
“This policy says PCR test, I can tell you from working in childcare that everything that is required of PCR tests previously has been changed to any test because tests are so hard to come by. I do not necessarily think that should be an issue because they can still do the safety checks,” she said.
Gutekenst said one wrinkle in the policy was deciding which activities would be high-risk and require testing.
“We talked about this policy, we have been around all non-credited things, and I think last time we ended up at high risk, which for right now we are determining that to be all athletics and overnight field trips,” she said.
At the time of the meeting, Superintendent Brian Cameron said there was only one planned overnight field trip, and he was already concerned about it.
“The only trip we have on the table right now is the Washington D.C. trip and we received information that our tests cannot be sustained, so that means if someone becomes positive or is not feeling well, we cannot do a test and stay at the field trip. That puts another very big concern for myself, and also there was some conversation about transportation because if you are positive you cannot use public transportation,” he said. “I am going to be honest it is getting very difficult to create a scenario or a trip we feel comfortable with.”
When asked if students and families had already paid for the trip, Jabish Brook Middle School Principal Thomas Ruscio said the school had not yet collected any payments for the trip.
“What I have said to all parents through this process since the very beginning was there are a number of details and logistics that would need to be figured out before committing to a trip. For that precise reason I could not in good faith ask people to register for a trip when some of the protocols and polices were being discussed to avoid a financial loss,” he said.
In terms of athletics, committee member Diane Brown said she was in favor of including all athletics in the high-risk definition.
“I agree with all athletics, all of them are competing against other school systems, they are traveling, they are on public transportation together and it is my preference to go with all athletics,” she said.
While he said he would vote in favor of the policy, Knapp said he would prefer only testing unvaccinated students.
“What we had before was a vaccinate or test proposal, I would be much more in favor of this policy if it were testing the unvaccinated students participating in those activities. The reason I say that is I am concerned the safety checks are taking a lot of resources and time and we are not seeing a lot of hits on them,” he said.
As a result of the ongoing omicron variant surge, School Nurse Leader Phyllis DuComb said the pool testing was catching positive cases across the board.
“We are catching more, for example, last week we had 13 positive pools and after we retested those pools, we found 13 positive asymptomatic students. We are also catching symptomatic students faster, parents are letting us know and children are coming down for the symptomatic testing, so we are catching a lot more. We are seeing vaccinated and unvaccinated students become positive and students that have had COVID [-19] in the past become positive a second time,” she said.
The board unanimously agreed to approve the policy and to keep the high-risk activities strictly to athletics and not other clubs or extracurriculars. Cameron added the overnight field trips will be discussed at a later date once a decision is made about the Washington D.C. field trip.
The Belchertown School Committee next meets on Jan. 25 and coverage of that meeting will appear in the Feb. 3 edition of The Reminder.