Return to School Update 12/31/21
We hope you are enjoying your winter break, and we are preparing to welcome everyone back on Monday, January 3, 2022. As you may know, COVID-19 cases are at an all-time high in Massachusetts and here in Hanover. Please monitor your family members for any COVID symptoms and stay home if feeling ill.
This week the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) announced it will be supplying 200,000 at-home rapid antigen tests to school districts so that all teachers and staff across the Commonwealth have the option to self-test for COVID-19 before they return to school from holiday break. This is an opportunity that we are offering to our staff, and we hope it is another useful tool as we work to keep schools open and safe.
This week, the CDC, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education made a number of changes to the COVID-19 Protocols:
Isolation
Duration: Self-isolation for COVID-19 positive cases is a minimum of 5 days (reduced from 10 days) after symptom onset or after positive PCR or antigen test, if asymptomatic.
- Return to school: After 5 days (return day 6) once they have:
- Been without fever for 24 hours (and without taking fever-reducing medications); and
- Experienced improvement in other symptoms.
Following the 5-day isolation period, individuals must mask for 5 additional days when around others.
Quarantine Options
Test and Stay: Students who have been a school-based close contact and are asymptomatic may attend school and school-sponsored activities if they participate in the Test and Stay program. The duration of the Test and Stay program has changed from 7 to 5 days from last exposure.
Traditional quarantine: Students and staff with household exposure, close contacts outside of school, and those who do not wish to test and stay still need to self-quarantine at home for 5 days, returning on day 6, as long as the person remains asymptomatic. Best practices include a negative test on day 5 after exposure, and this is the expectation in Hanover due to the accessibility of testing through Hanover’s MIH program.
Those who are fully vaccinated and asymptomatic are exempt from testing and quarantine protocols. At this time, DESE still considers people with 2 doses of Pfizer or Moderna, or 1 dose of Janssen (J&J) plus two weeks, to be fully vaccinated.
Additional information about updates to protocols will be shared as soon as they become available.
If your child has experienced one of the following within 5 days of returning to school, please stay home from school and contact your school nurse via email:
- Positive COVID-19 test
- Close contact with a person who has tested positive
- Symptoms of COVID-19
A Note About the Weeks Ahead
At this time, we are expecting a normal opening for our schools this Monday. Over the past week, several people have expressed concern about the current rise in COVID-19 cases in Hanover and the possible impact on schools. While these concerns are completely understandable, we will continue to do everything in our power to keep our schools open and functioning as normally as possible. If we find ourselves in a position that safely opening school is not achievable because of staffing shortages due to health issues, or an excessive number of positive student cases that we cannot reasonably trace to sources outside of school, the likely first step would be a “snow day” approach where we would close schools for a day to regroup and make plans to adjust to whatever the situation requires. Hopefully, we will not need to use this option, but I want to be as transparent as possible to manage expectations.
For additional COVID-19 information and updates, please visit Hanover's COVID-19 Information Center.
Wishing all of you a very happy and healthy new year!
Sincerely,
Matt Ferron, Superintendent
Patricia Smith, Director of Health Services