Good plan

Like many parents, students and teachers out there, we are happy to see that our local school districts are officially introducing plans to return to a normal school year in September. After more than a year of mask mandates, cancelled events, remote learning and seemingly endless quarantines, students and teachers can hopefully get back to the business of uninterrupted learning.

The back-to-school plans introduced at Monday’s school board meetings are remarkable for their basic commonsense. They recommend mask wearing for those who might still be COVID carriers (young children who aren’t eligible for vaccines), but they stay away from the mandates that caused so much strife last school year. At the same time, the plans also include provisions for what happens if COVID cases start to spike (above 5 percent). All it says, though, is that the superintendent will request a meeting of the school board to discuss the situation. It avoids boxing administrators or board members into a situation where they are forced to take draconian measures against a disease that has yet to kill any school-age kids in Wisconsin.

The relative safety of younger people during the COVID pandemic leads us to agree with Colby School Board member David Decker, who doesn’t want to see another rash of quarantines forcing students to stay at home. Throughout last school year, it didn’t take much to be sent home for two weeks. If you happened to have 15 minutes or more of contact with someone who tested positive, you had to join the ranks of the quarantined.

Perhaps the most important question is this: what happens if a student shows up to school with a sore throat and cough? Are they automatically assumed to have COVID, which would trigger all of the contact tracing and quarantine protocols? Or, are the schools and health departments willing to wait for a COVID test before enacting all those measures? We sure hope so. Otherwise, a lot of students with regular old colds and flus are going to set off waves of quarantines. Instead, they should just be sent home with instructions to drink lots of fluids and get plenty of rest — just as we did before COVID.

The Tribune-Phonograph editorial board consists of publisher Kris O’Leary and editor Kevin O’Brien