February 2022

The Florida Department of Health has updated its guidelines for students to return to class after testing positive for COVID-19.  

Students can now return to class five days after testing positive for COVID-19. Previously, students spent 10 days out of school, unless there was a note from a doctor or a negative COVID-19 test.

We want to make you aware of a change to our district’s COVID-19 reporting procedures. Beginning on January 18th, the school district and the local department of health will stop contact tracing for reported COVID-19 cases in our schools.  What this means is that you will notice that quarantines will no longer be tracked or appear on our dashboard. Positive cases should still be reported to schools and/or the Department of Health.

There are two main reasons for this change.  The first being that the State of Florida has transitioned into a new phase of battling the pandemic and has recently outlined new priorities that are focused on preventing COVID-19 spread at long-term care facilities.  Secondly, per State rule, parents are not required to quarantine children who are a close contact to a positive COVID-19 case as long as they remain symptom free. Since the rule regarding parent choice in quarantining child(ren) has come into effect, we have seen parents overwhelmingly decide not to quarantine their children who have been exposed to COVID-19.  Because of this, quarantine numbers delivered on our dashboard are not able to be presented accurately since the number of students being identified as close contacts does not correlate to how many of those students will still attend school regularly.

The change to contract tracing and quarantine reporting will be reflected on the next COVID-19 dashboard which will be posted on Friday, January 21^st at https://fl02201431.schoolwires.net/COVID-19.  BPS will continue to post our COVID-19 dashboard every Tuesday and Friday which will reflect the number of reported positive cases, and the schools which are impacted.

Families of students who are identified as being a possible contact to a confirmed COVID case will still receive notification with the information necessary should they choose to quarantine their child.