Granton Interim Administrator and Health Care Coordinator Discuss Navigating the School Year During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Monday, December 21st, 2020 -- 10:04 AM

-Earlier this year the Granton School Board approved the hiring Dr. Courtney Schoessow as the district’s Health Care Coordinator.

And, because of COVID-19, she has been very busy moving the district through the coronavirus pandemic.  I spoke with Granton’s Interim Administrator James Kuchta and Dr. Schoessow as they discussed how they’ve navigated the pandemic.

Mr. Kuchta:  “Dr. Schoessow was hired by the school board, actually in August, the same time that I was, to work with the school district as Health Coordinator and full time substitute teacher.  And she’s been working primarily with the COVID situation throughout the school year.”

Dr. Schoessow:  “I have my Doctorate in Health Administration and my Masters in Public Health, so it’s really great for me to be able to help the school out this year with being the Health Coordinator and the long term sub for the school.”

“One of my primary responsibilities is taking care of the health and wellness of our school and that, this year, revolves around COVID, so I keep pretty busy with that."

"But then I also get to do Health Education in the classrooms and teach the kids about hand washing and wearing their mask.  In the new year I’ll be giving some personal hygiene education.  It’s a great fun job!”

Mr. Kuchta:  “Granton does not have a school nurse like many schools do, so it was nice and it was good foresight on the part of the school board to create this new position and give her these responsibilities.”

Question:  “What are some of the things you’ve done to help guide the school district and the students in moving forward in the school year through this pandemic?”

Dr. Schoessow:  “One of the first things I did is we created a COVID guide for our school, which gives us the guidelines and the protocols to follow in this global pandemic."

"And it covers everything from how should we clean, to how we should teach our kids about hand washing and hand sanitizers, to social distancing in the classroom.  So that’s been an instrumental part of being able to keep our school district open and healthy as possible.”

Question:  “When it comes to keeping the school open or closing the district due to COVID, are you the one that makes that decision or are you one of several people?”

Dr. Schoessow:  “I would be one of the ones that would be in that decision making process, but it’s really our district administrator, our school board and the health department putting all the information together to decide that.”

Mr. Kuchta:  “That’s a really good question and I’ve worked closely with Courtney and with our principal Ms. Kraus and with the school board, but we, as a team here, on the daily operations of the school and decision on whether to close or not, we’ve been fortunate to not have to close the school and to be going to school every single day with the virtual option."

"And we’ve done things like hire extra staff to wipe all railings, doorknobs, lightswitches throughout the day as part of the COVID funding that’s been provided.  We also meet pretty regularly with our health team, again with Courtney, with our principal, and myself, and that decision to stay open or to close as we review the numbers, we use numbers including the Health Department.”

“Another thing we do, early in the school year, when that COVID guide was presented to the board, a 42 page document that Courtney primarily developed and presented, along with assistance from the Health Department, but she put that together."

"Then the board decided they would review our COVID protocols each month and there has been the mask mandate from the Governor’s office and requests to have small gatherings of up to 10 people only."

"So, we’ve been following those guidelines.  And, again, Courtney’s position gives us a lot of expertise and helps us out with monitoring students that have been either detected as having COVID, which we’ve had very few, but primarily with the close contacts for staff and students.”

Question:  “Speaking of those close contacts, do you help the Health Department with close contacts if a student or teacher tests positive for COVID?”

Dr. Schoessow:  “Yes.  One somebody is deemed as a positive case then I work with the Health Department.  If it’s a student or staff then I, and the principal, do the contact tracing within the school and then we give that information to the county Health Department."

"And then the county Health Department takes that information and gets the close contacts from outside of the school building to see who would be deemed as a close contact to that positive case.  So we work regularly, almost every day, with each other on different cases.”

Question:  “Looking forward to a time with no COVID, what are you hoping to address or work on during that time?”

Dr. Schoessow:  “Well, I’m looking forward to the day that I can say lice is our biggest problem at school!  So, it’s everything from looking at what we do for lice protocol to utilizing hand washing and hand sanitizing."

"Just the general every day health education needs at the school.  Mental health, I think, is still going to be a huge issue that we need to address this year with COVID and in the future because kids throughout the nation have an increase in mental health needs and we need to address that.”

Mr. Kuchta:  “I might add that, in addition to that, we’re far from putting the masks away and being beyond the pandemic.  We did sign up our school with the county Health Department to be a vaccination site."

"So, once the vaccinations are available, we’re hoping we’re able to get all of our staff and students and the community vaccinated, so we can move beyond this pandemic and get back to something normal, which, at that point, we hope that Courtney will be able to stay on and do more substitute teaching and helping with other health issue that she had talked about.”

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.