Chelsea-area school district to participate in pool testing, mandate masks inside

CHELSEA — In order to keep students in the classroom as much as possible, Regional School Unit 12 has decided to participate in pool testing and universal mask use, per the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention’s guidelines.

The vote to follow CDC guidelines in the district’s opening plan, which included pool testing and universal masking, passed by a 10-7 margin at Tuesday night’s board of directors meeting.

Though the two actions are not “coupled together,” Maine Department of Education’s spokesperson Kelli Deveaux said, each action will help students stay in school and not miss class time if a positive COVID-19 case were to arise. RSU 12 will be in-person five days a week, as the district was able to do last year. The district will not offer a remote option.

“Last year, close contacts were defined as the whole class,” Superintendent Howie Tuttle said. “This year, if you are universally masked as a school, the only person who has to quarantine is the child with COVID-19. That’s a pretty big dilemma if I want to have as many students in school as possible.”

He said he feels like he is in “a little bit of a box” among the divided community opinion regarding students wearing masks in school. With the CDC giving “recommendations” to schools and not “requirements,” Tuttle said he is “not allowed to ignore their rules.”

RSU 12 and the Augusta Public Schools are the only two districts in the Augusta area to participate in pool testing, so far.

Other districts have talked about it but did not feel confident they would gather the number of participants needed. When the program first rolled out in May, it was 30% of a building — now, according to Deveaux, there is “no baseline.”

Pool testing happens once a week and is done anonymously. Schools will get their tests back within 24 to 48 hours. If there is a positive COVID-19 case found among the pool, then all of the students take a BinaxNOW test to figure out the person who contracted the virus. Once the BinaxNOW test comes back and narrows down the positive COVID-19 case, then only that student or staff member has to quarantine. The rest of the class does not.

If a student is asymptomatic, then the student does not need to quarantine from school or extracurricular activities, Deveaux said, but the ability to have students “get out of quarantine” only applies to those who agreed to participate in pool testing.

RSU 12 parent Gretchen Morrow said the “last thing she wants” is for her child to “quarantine multiple times.” She said her child’s teacher contracted COVID-19 last year, but the rest of the class did not — she credits it to masking.

But because the CDC guidelines were different last year, the whole class had to quarantine.

With the updated guidelines, if a school is following the CDC recommendation to universally wear masks inside, and a student is more than 3-feet away from a positive COVID-19 case, the student does not have to quarantine.

Deveaux said, “universal masking and pool testing are not coupled, meaning you don’t have to do both to narrow the quarantine list.” But RSU 12 has decided to do both anyway and will register for pool testing in the coming days.

More of the protocols are “flexible” this year, Tuttle said, if a school district chooses to universally mask. So far most schools in central Maine have chosen to follow CDC guidelines, with Madison schools opting to leave mask-wearing up to parents and guardians.

“The CDC said 3 feet is ‘OK,'” Tuttle told the school board. “We can do instruction differently; we can do group work at tables; we couldn’t do that last year. They (the CDC) said to ‘Do the best you can’ at lunch, they can take off masks.

“The most important thing is putting the learning back in place,” he added. “If there is something in the way of learning like if you are going to a speech teacher and need to take off the masks, you can take off the masks.”

Tuttle said there is “no guidance” on mask breaks either, so teachers can choose when it is appropriate for students to take them and they can be done in the classroom now, not just outside.

Even those who are vaccinated have to wear masks inside.

Parents and school board members did feel strongly about the mask mandate and some parents participated in the public comment section of the board meeting. RSU 12 includes Chelsea, Windsor, Whitefield, Alna, Palermo, Somerville and Westport Island.

Some school board members, like Ryan Carver, thought there should be no masking at all. He amended the motion to follow CDC guidelines multiple times — after the motion to make masking optional failed, he tried amending the motion to not require masks at all.

“If the state of Maine isn’t mandating it, then we shouldn’t,” Carver said. “Let kids go to school and let the parents make the decision.”

Carver voted against the motion to follow the safety guidelines that were in place, as did board members Richard Cote, Rick Danforth, Dustin Mellor, Kimberly Hutchinson, Russell Gates and Deborah Myers. Board members who voted in favor were James Willigar, Sandra Devaney, Will Sugg, Lynnette Conroy, Suzanne Balbo, Deborah Talacko, Mary Coventry, Kristina Verney, Richard DeVries and Doug Morier.