Park City High School is starting the week with 124 active cases of COVID. Treasure Mountain Junior High has 41 cases and Ecker Hill Middle School has 30 cases. Treasure Mountain Principal Caleb Fine emailed families Monday afternoon alerting them that test to stay would start Tuesday.
COVID case count dashboards for campuses are updated each night at 6 p.m. Last week saw cases climbing around the district as the omicron variant makes its way through Utah.
The Summit County Health Department expects the omicron surge to peak between the second and third week of January.
The district’s elementary schools were each under 30 active cases, but Jeremy Ranch at 24 cases was inching closer to the test to stay protocol.
Parental consent is required for test to stay, but students whose parents don’t consent won’t be allowed to remain at school. They’ll have to stay at home for 10 days or until they provide a negative test result.
Students who miss testing events at school can get tested through another health care provider. All test results are logged with Utah Department of Health.
In accordance with state law, teachers and staff aren’t required to participate, but can if they choose.
The Utah Department of Health reported that once a school has had a test to stay event, that campus will not automatically have another one unless new cases hit the threshold. So for example, the high school’s 124 cases have already been identified and test to stay has ben triggered, so the campus would need to record 30 new cases above that to trigger test to stay again.
Teachers, administrators and staff have COVID too – not just students.
A school district employee told KPCW that 16 PCHS teachers and administrators were out sick last Friday, nearly a quarter of the educational staff. Some were sick with confirmed cases of COVID while others were at home waiting for test results after being exposed.
Teachers who were at school filled in and covered colleagues’ classes during their prep periods. Like other employers with staffing woes, the district is still grappling with a shortage of substitute teachers.