Dear Families,
I hope this letter finds you safe and healthy on this Veteran’s Day. I wanted to reach out early with my Director’s Letter as I know that many of you have questions and concerns about the recent cases of COVID-19 in our community. The goal of our Reopening Plan was to maximize the time for an in-person learning option while keeping our kids safe. This is still our goal. If the time comes that we feel that we cannot maintain a safe environment for our students we will make the choice to move to distance learning. If this is the case, you will receive a notification from me through the portal as well as on the PPOS Families Facebook page.
Notifications from the district are valuable to the families to inform them of what is happening in our community, however, a move to distance learning by PPOS will be a choice we make or is made by San Juan Basin Public Health. Currently, PPOS does not have any test results that we are waiting on or students that have been asked to quarantine…
This is part of a letter sent out to families by Pagosa Peak Open School’s School Director Angela Reali-Crossland yesterday, November 11. In the letter, Ms. Reali-Crossland also noted that Archuleta County is shifting from ‘Level Blue: Safer at HOme’ to ‘Level Yellow; Safer at Home’ on the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) capacity dial — but the ‘color change’ would not affect the ongoing operations at PPOS, because the Reopening Plan was written months ago, at a time when Archuleta County was still in ‘Level Yellow’. The PPOS plan has all students able to attend in-person classes five days a week — with the option to do only remote learning at home, instead, if the family prefers that option.
But plans can change.
We’re going to discuss our local schools in this editorial series. That discussion ties in closely with the coronavirus events in the entire community.
Archuleta County managed to climb up out of ‘Level Yellow’ during the summer months, and on the most recent CDPHE ‘dial’ map dated November 8… (and shared here in the Daily Post on November 9)… Archuleta County was shown as ‘Safer at Home Level Blue: Safer at Home – Cautious’.
That was on November 8. As we can see on the map above, only seven counties — Mesa, Summit, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Adams, and Logan — were in ‘Safer at Home Level Orange: High Risk’. Three counties were in ‘Level Green’, the ‘most relaxed’ level. Our neighbors in La Plata County were in ‘Level Yellow’.
Things have changed over the past four days. San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH) is moving La Plata County to ‘Level Orange’ … and Archuleta County to ‘Level Yellow’. The changes are driven mainly by an increase on the number of confirmed COVID infections, locally, over the past two weeks. From yesterday’s press release from SJBPH:
To slow a rise in cases and reduce the opportunity for a super-spreader event that would threaten our school learning models and our local economy, San Juan Basin Public Health (SJBPH) and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) are moving Archuleta County to Level Yellow: Safer at Home ‘ as of Friday, November 13, 2020.
SJBPH has identified 15 cases of COVID-19 in Archuleta County in the last 14 days. This is the highest incidence rate in Archuleta County since the beginning of the pandemic. Due to the county’s smaller population size, a single super-spreader event could make the virus widespread in the community and lead to regular exposures at businesses, schools, and social gatherings. Moving to ‘Level Yellow’ limits this possibility by reducing the maximum capacity at large venues and events. Additionally, this change moves last call for alcohol sales to 11:00pm to reduce transmission in late night social settings where mask-wearing is less common…
With the onset of winter and more activities moving indoors, the community must act now to severely limit social gatherings, move as many employees as possible to remote work, and stay home as much as possible, to keep everyone safe from COVID-19.
“Our community has shown we can choose to be successful in fighting COVID-19,” said Liane Jollon, executive director of SJBPH. “While cases rose around the state in the fall, we took the steps necessary to keep our schools open and our economy strong. But Archuleta County will not be spared the uncontrolled levels of disease seen in the rest of Colorado unless we all act now to reduce the spread. We know everyone is tired of this pandemic, and we are so thankful of the sacrifices everyone has made in their workplaces and social lives. We must ask all community members to once again come together and adopt good public health practices to keep our families and neighbors safe…”
Here’s how the state capacity ‘dial’ map will look tomorrow, November 13:
There are now only two ‘Level Green’ counties. The number of ‘Level Blue’ counties dropped from 18 down to 13. And we now see 24 ‘Level Orange’ counties, instead of 7. (Still no counties at ‘Level Red’.)
A rising rate of infections, and reported cases within school buildings, have caused numerous Colorado school district to switch back to ‘remote learning’ — also known as ‘distance learning’ — the type of home-based computer-driven instruction that took place all across the state last spring, during the initial phase of the COVID pandemic. The school districts now moving at least some schools to ‘remote learning’ include: Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Boulder, Adams, Littleton, Glenwood Springs, Falcon, Harrison, Cherry Creek…
As noted, Pagosa Peak Open School is still offering in-person instruction.
And at least for the moment, Archuleta School District’s three non-charter schools are also offering in-person instruction — in spite of two confirmed case at Pagosa Springs Middle School.
Can classroom instruction continue, as we head into Thanksgiving?