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Date: 2/4/2021
WESTFIELD – During the Jan. 28 meeting, the Westfield School Committee discussed returning to school on Feb. 1, vaccine rollout, and falling COVID-19 numbers across the city.
To start the discussion about returning to the hybrid model on Feb. 1, Superintendent Stefan Czaporowski said COVID-19 cases were falling in both the district and the city.
“Even the city’s numbers are headed in the right direction, last week there were 173 new cases, this week there were 134 so there is a decrease city wide. As far as our school numbers we had 13 cases reported this week. I think the numbers are going down after the holiday jump,” he said.
As with every discussion around the back-to-school plan, Westfield Health Director Joe Rouse joined the call and discussed the current vaccine rollout plan.
“Now that the vaccine is out there and we have entered Phase 2 for the seniors, it means the teachers and staff in the schools will be immunized earlier than they originally thought, but they did prioritize the teachers under the 65 and older seniors,” he said.
Rouse said there likely will not be enough doses of the vaccine to vaccinate everyone once the health department is given the vaccine.
“The state is really funneling the vaccination down through mass vaccination sites, pharmacies, and doctor’s offices. They have little bit better of an ability to do it every day, we can’t have a clinic every day in Westfield. We will be supplied but we have already been told by the state we are probably not going to have a lot of doses to deal with,” he said.
Mayor Don Humason said he was disappointed that the state picked the Eastfield Mall as a vaccination site in Western Massachusetts.
“We’d love to have a clinic here in Westfield and be one of the mass vaccination sites, in fact we offered that to the state, but they chose Eastfield Mall. I would’ve preferred the Big E, but it would have been nice if they picked us,” he said.
Rouse added that eventually Westfield will have a clinic for vaccinations, but a date has not been determined yet.
When asked about concerns for the upcoming February vacation, Rouse said he was in favor of continuing with the hybrid model.
“I think if everything is looking good before that happens, we just have to let it go. I fully expect those community numbers are going to continue to go down. Unless we start to have an outbreak or clusters in the schools, I think we just have to go for it,” he said.
Committee member Ray Diaz then thanked Rouse for all his effort in fighting the pandemic and coming out to the meetings to provide updates since the pandemic began.
“You come to all these meetings, I know our colleagues, we all really appreciate your insight, and we look to you for the expertise. Thank you very much for helping us getting through what we’ve gotten through, and we are looking forward to many more meetings, we really appreciate you,” he said.
After discussing the current state of the reopening plan, Czaporowski said the principals met to discuss adjusting the school calendar since Cohort A has had more in-person learning time than Cohort B.
“It was 11 to 0 after some discussions, we also heard from our remote learning center partners and they did not support the change at this time. We do think there is plenty of time left in the school year where many things could happen, we could have more snow, or we could go fully remote again. There’s so much time left in the year we have time to be flexible with it,” he said.
During the meeting, the committee also approved a motion to swap the elementary parent teacher conference date from Feb. 10 to 24 and another motion to continue with the current $125 per day substitute teacher rate through the end of February.