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Date: 12/29/2021
SOUTHWICK – Letters have been sent home to the families of students in the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District with a repeated record of not properly wearing a face covering during school.
Superintendent Jennifer Willard told the School Committee last week that the letters were sent Dec. 22 to an undisclosed number of students’ parents after what Willard described as a surge of COVID-19 cases in the school district. She also said school officials are seeing higher rates of “mask fatigue,” where students are seen not wearing a mask, or not wearing one properly, as the semester rolls on.
“Not everyone will get a letter, but one will go home to kids who are chronically needing to be spoken to about masks,” said Willard.
She told the committee that there had been 22 cases of COVID-19 within the school district in a two-day period just before the holiday break, including cases on school athletic teams. Though the number of cases detected within the district community has increased, Willard said that school administrators have found little spread of COVID-19 within the schools themselves. Instead, she said that contact tracing has found that most of the cases were transmitted outside of the school day.
Willard partially credited the statewide masking rule with the lack of in-school spread, and said that it shows how important that policy is.
Echoing the concerns of health officials locally and across the country, Willard said the schools expect to see a post-holiday surge in COVID-19 cases after a season of travel and family gatherings, especially while Massachusetts is already breaking single-day infection rate records from the last winter surge.
“We do expect to see a post-holiday surge, but we are hoping to see a dip afterwards,” said Willard. “We want to be doing everything we can to keep schools open.”
The vaccination rate in the district’s schools, much like Hampden County as a whole, has been lagging far behind the rest of the state. Willard said that the vaccination rate at Southwick Regional School was 53 percent on Oct. 17, and has only risen to 56 percent since then, while the state as a whole has a vaccination rate of more than 70 percent.
That rate only measures people who are fully vaccinated. Willard said that there are many students, especially in the younger grades, who have received one dose of a two-shot vaccine and are waiting to receive their second dose, which will raise the vaccination rate.
The district hosted a mobile vaccination clinic, which Willard said saw 47 people getting their first vaccine dose or their booster shot.