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Area schools, university react to COVID-19 threat

Limits on who can visit schools and on field trips and additional cleaning of facilities are among the ways schools in Lycoming County are addressing concerns about COVID-19, or Coronavirus.

In response to the spread of coronavirus, Michael D. Pawlik, superintendent at the East Lycoming School District, said the district is temporarily not allowing visitors, presenters and guests into district buildings while school is in session, as well as suspending field trips planned up to March 24.

“It really breaks down to three general categories that we need to consider,” he told the school board Tuesday. “Visitors coming into the school, our kids going out of the school on field trips and finally, evening events.”

“The first one and probably the most logical place to start is limiting folks that are coming into our school for a million different reasons,” he added.

He noted that grandparents come to the elementary schools to read to students, which he said was probably not a good idea at this time.

“We’re telling teachers, if they have guest speakers scheduled over the next three or four weeks, to put them off until the end of the year until we have a better grasp of what’s going on,” he said.

Pawlik told the board that in terms of field trips, some of the events have been canceled by the destinations. All of the competitions at Bloomsburg University, he noted, have been canceled because the university has extended spring break and is training its staff for possible online learning.

Sporting and after-school events, however, will continue as scheduled, Pawlik said.

In the wake of the outbreaks in the state, the Montoursville Area School District would only have the ability to move to a virtual learning environment for about a week, said the administration.

“Our community has not

developed enough internet capability,” said Christina Bason, superintendent at the board meeting Tuesday.

It’s not that the district is unable to provide academic resources, but they provide so many hands-on opportunities, that the education would suffer without it, she said.

When considering the safety of their students, if it were deemed better to keep them home, “(the school) would have to be closed,” said Bason.

“We are constantly assessing the coronavirus issue and we get a lot of information from federal and state sources and they are liaisons between the CDC, state Department of Health and the state Department of Education,” she said.

Pedro A. Rivera, secretary of the state Department of Education, is also conducting webinars for superintendents, she said.

Montoursville schools have also prepared custodians for additional responsibilities in response to the virus, and has allowed them an extra hour per day to complete their duties, said Bason.

“We did hold a custodial staff meeting with the expectation of having the staff understand what the additional responsibilities would be in cleaning, they were all present and on board,” she said. “They understood what we were asking.”

The administration assesses each field trip, athletic event and extracurricular activity held outside the district to determine the safety of the students, including a recently canceled field trip going to Montgomery county.

“It is not in our best interest to send students to where they could be possibly contaminated and bring that back to their families,” said Bason.

A plan has been sent to the board members to handle some aspects including PSSAs and Keystone testing, as well as board meetings, if the risk of infection becomes too high.

“We are prepared to continue moving forward with cleaning buildings and keeping things open in the district at this point in time,” she said.

Cleaning also was a topic at the East Lycoming School Board’s meeting, where Pawlik detailed how the maintenance staff has sanitized the district’s buildings while school was not in session Monday.

“We brought everyone in and, in one day, they were able to go through all of our buildings, wipe everything down and sterilize everything down,” he said. “They were able to cover all the rooms in all of our buildings.”

Officials at Lock Haven University have announced that face-to-face instruction has temporarily been suspended.

Although the university has no reported or confirmed cases of the coronavirus, Robert Pignatello, university president, said that this was a “pre-emptive action aimed at preventing the potential spread of what the World Health Organization has designated a global pandemic.”

Face-to-face instruction will be suspended for the week following spring break. The faculty will use the week of March 16 to prepare their courses for remote and online modes of instruction, according to a news release from the university.

Courses will resume by remote instruction March 23 and continue through April 3. Face-to-face classes are expected to resume normal delivery in classrooms on April 6, which is subject to change. For students currently enrolled in online courses, both undergraduate and graduate, classes will resume on March 16 as scheduled, the release stated.

During this time, students will be expected to temporarily live off campus. Students needing to live on campus between March 16 and April 3 must provide a justifiable reason to remain in campus housing.

The university has canceled all university-sponsored non-athletic events and gatherings through April 3. In addition, the university is restricting visitors to campus during that period.

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