Covid Health and Safety Guidance

At this time, MMSD is not permitting visitors inside of schools and district buildings. However, school leaders can determine access to their buildings on a case-by-case basis, in partnership with health staff.  Any visitor must follow our health and safety mitigation strategies.

For the start of the 2021-22 school year, community volunteers will not be allowed in MMSD buildings, other than health and mental/behavioral health clinicians, who must follow our health and safety mitigation strategies. 

School communities are preparing to work hard to teach and practice some new routines and behaviors, such as wearing a face covering and maintaining distance. All MMSD staff are required to complete a COVID-19 training module in our Talent Portal. Training addressed the following:

• Physical Distancing

• Personal Protective Equipment/Masks and Cloth Face Covering

• Hand Washing and Hand Sanitizer

• Symptom Screening

Every morning families and staff will receive an email prompting them to monitor their/their child's symptoms. Students or staff who have any symptoms of illness will be directed to stay home. (Any symptom alone, such as a runny nose or congestion, may be an indication of COVID-19. It is important to stay home to avoid spreading illness to others. Those showing symptoms of illness at school will be sent home.)

Our school leaders and nursing teams have strong systems in place to rapidly isolate sick or symptomatic individuals, contact families and send sick individuals home. 

School nurses collaborate with Public Health Madison & Dane County to provide contact tracing within schools for MMSD employees and students, following the PHMDC’s Action Plan for Confirmed or Suspected COVID-19 Case in a Dane County School, and to direct any close contacts to quarantine for the required period of time. 

In accordance with CDC & PHMDC Guidance, MMSD students and staff will have two quarantining options:

• Quarantine for 10 days after your last exposure. No test is required to end quarantine. Monitor yourself for symptoms until 14 days after your last exposure.
• Quarantine and get tested for COVID-19 6 or 7 days after your last exposure. If your test is negative, you could end quarantine after 7 days. You must have your negative test result before ending quarantine and the test cannot be before day 6. Monitor yourself for symptoms until 14 days after your last exposure.

We have been stockpiling PPE for the last six months. We have 50,000 student masks that have already been delivered to our buildings, we well as PPE for staff members. 

Specialized PPE, such as plastic face shields, are available for staff members who may be in close proximity with students with special needs as well as our nursing staff. 

We are grateful for our community partners, including the Boys and Girls Club and the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools, who have stepped us to support our students and families in so many ways, including donations of masks. 

All staff must wear a mask. Some employees may qualify for an ADA accommodation. If an employee is unable to wear a mask, principals should connect them with Human Resources.

Students are expected to wear masks unless the student has a disability related condition that prevents them from wearing a mask or removing their mask themselves. IEP and 504 teams will meet to discuss what accommodations the student may need and determine if the student will receive face-to-face instruction. Staff should take extra precautions (e.g., a face shield with a mask) if a student is unable to wear a mask. Efforts should be made to desensitize the student to wearing a mask (consult Occupational Therapy). 

We know many of our students, families and staff are carrying a great deal of anxiety and stress as we approach a return in person or continuing with virtual learning. We recognize that both scenarios involve adapting to significant changes. Whatever decision is made, we will be ready to support the needs of our staff, our students and their families.

 All schools will offer free COVID-19 testing for students and staff. Testing helps reduce community spread and keeps schools operating safely. Testing individuals who are symptomatic or close contacts helps enable rapid detection of cases in the school community and reduce or prevent school outbreaks.

Through a collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, we are partnering with a testing vendor called COVID Clinic. Temporarily, COVID Clinic will be housed under a tent outside school buildings. In the coming weeks, at most schools, COVID Clinic will be installing an 8 x 8 foot kiosk outdoors, adjacent to school buildings. At a limited number of schools lacking exterior electrical outlets, it will be located at a dedicated space indoors. 

Families will have the opportunity to sign a consent form allowing their students, if symptomatic, to be tested right at school. Students will visit the kiosk only when accompanied by a family member or staff member. 
COVID Clinic will offer two test types:
    •    Rapid COVID-19 Antigen Test

    •    PCR COVID-19 Test


Watch for specific details to come in the near future about this opportunity. Learn more about how the Department of Health Services is partnering with Wisconsin schools to offer testing. 
 

If there is a positive COVID-19 case in a building, the school will send an email to all families and staff so that you have this information. This includes after-school childcare programs. 

Your child's privacy is important to us. In line with the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), schools will not provide details on anyone who tests positive for COVID-19. They will not identify names, whether the individual is a student or staff member, grade, language, gender identity and so on. 

For privacy reasons, the school will also not identify the number of cases on a particular day in the communication. (For example, if they are made aware of two individuals who test positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, we would send an email Wednesday letting you know that at least one person tested positive.) 

Please remember: Unless you are directly contacted by our Health Office, your child is not considered a close contact in need of quarantining. For staff, unless you are directly contacted by our Health Office, you are not considered a close contact.

If your child is exposed to anyone at school or on a school bus with COVID-19, they may be considered a Close Contact, depending on their proximity and duration of exposure. The general definition of a Close Contact continues to be someone within 6 feet of someone with COVID-19 for 15 minutes or more in a 24-hour period. 

However, unlike last school year, not all Close Contacts will necessarily be required to quarantine. 

Per the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention's K-12 indoor classroom setting exception*, a student** would not be considered Close Contact or need to quarantine if all three of the following conditions are met:

• The student was not within fewer than 3 feet of the positive individual for over 15 minutes total in a 24-hour period. 
• The student and the positive individual have been wearing their masks consistently and correctly. 
• The school is following all layered mitigation strategies.

*A student would still be required to quarantine from extracurricular activities and non-school related activities, but they could still attend afterschool childcare.  
**This exception does not apply to teachers, staff, or other adults in the indoor classroom setting.If your child is considered a Close Contact, our Health Office will work with classroom staff to identify whether they are required to quarantine. If they are, our Health Office will notify you by phone and will work with you to arrange for your child to go home to quarantine. They will also provide you with a letter with instructions for quarantining and other information about getting tested and when they can return to school.

We continue to publish a case count dashboard that is updated every Wednesday. We restarted the dashboard for the 2021-22 school year on August 18. (The previous school year's case count is archived on the page for your reference.)

You can check the page at any time to see the number of individuals who have tested positive and who have been close contacts in any MMSD building in the last 14 days: We also report the district-wide cumulative total for the school year at: mmsd.org/casecount. It is our desire to be transparent while protecting individual student and staff privacy. For this reason, we suppress numbers of 6 or fewer.

We certainly hope this will occur rarely if at all, but there may be times that your child is not exposed to COVID-19 but their classroom must temporarily close, or the entire building must temporarily close for a period of time. 

This could be due to a variety of reasons. Factors considered include the number of student and staff close contacts, other student and staff absences, cohort cross over, safety practices, Public Health data and other community concerns.

In these cases, we will communicate with you as quickly as possible about closures so you have as much time as possible to plan. However, we know that there may be times when there is very little time to plan, but we will do our best to send texts (please be sure you have opted in to receiving text messages in Infinite Campus), automated phone calls, and emails.