New quarantine guidelines should cut time students spend outside Oklahoma classrooms

Change in CDC guidance leads to reduced quarantine times for students

• Robby Korth
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Robby Korth covers education for StateImpact Oklahoma. He grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma and Fayetteville, Arkansas and is a graduate of the University of Nebraska. Before working at StateImpact, he covered higher education for The Roanoke Times newspaper in Virginia.

In a state where more than 90% of school districts are participating in in-person instruction, quarantines have limited students’ actual time in a classroom.

That time away could be cut in half, though, thanks to new guidelines from the CDC and Oklahoma’s Departments of Health and Education.

The new CDC  guidelines still suggest quarantining for 14 days. But they also say that if a person exposed to COVID-19 receives a negative test and doesn’t show symptoms they only need to stay home for seven days. If they don’t get tested and remain asymptomatic, they should stay home for 10 days.

The move has been applauded by superintendents across Oklahoma. Jenks Public Schools, for example, has almost 400 students out because of potential exposure to the coronavirus. Getting those students back in the classroom is a good thing, superintendent Stacey Butterfield said Monday at Jenks’ school board meeting.

“It’s nice to see… the CDC looking at how this has evolved and modifying these quarantine protocols to reflect the knowledge that we’ve gained throughout this virus,” she said.

Districts are having a tough time dealing with quarantines. 

Woodward Public Schools, which later rescinded its quarantine policy and will adopt the CDC guidelines, had at one point decided to not quarantine students if those exposed and an infected person were all wearing masks. That type of policy has been happening across the state, but mostly unofficially. 

State officials warned districts last month that it wasn’t a good idea to not follow CDC guidelines.

Additionally, Mustang Public Schools has announced a program that will allow students to be in school while they quarantine after a COVID-19 exposure.

Mustang officials have not answered StateImpact’s questions about how many students are participating in that program, though as many as 20 could take part.

With the pandemic raging, now is not the time to get creative with quarantining, former state epidemiologist Aaron Wendelboe told StateImpact.

“As far as what we need to be doing at this time, I would just adhere to the more strict quarantine measures of, if you’ve been exposed, stay home… minimize those opportunities for transmission so that we can bend the curve again,” Wendelboe said.