By Pepper Fisher

OLYMPIA – There’s new guidance from the Washington State Dept. of health for schools and childcare facilities going into the next school year.

A news release from the Department of Health lists new regulations for what they call “a new stage of coexisting with COVID-19…knowing that it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future.”

The rules do not require students to be vaccinated in order to attend schools or childcare, but all employees and volunteers must be fully vaccinated or have an approved medical or religious exemption.

County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry says things have changed a bit in the last couple of years, and so our methods have changed with them.

“Yeah, a lot of the emphasis before was on a mixture of testing and contact tracing. Now that we have so much Covid-19 circulating in the community, contact tracing is less effective than it used to be. So now, really, the guidance for schools primarily focuses on keeping kids out of school who are sick, which is really always been good policy. But now we’re really pushing it more around Covid.”

If a student has any signs of illness before school starts, have them tested for Covid. If a staff member or student begins to have symptoms at school, they must be sent home immediately.

A student or staff member who tests positive must isolate themselves, and can return to school after five full days if they are asymptomatic and have had no fever for the past 24 hours. That’s a shorter quarantine period than last year.

“The best, safest thing to do is stay home for 10 days, but we know that keeping a child out of school does really affect their ability to learn. And so, we’re trying to prioritize keeping kids in school as much as we can, while keeping it safe. And thankfully, we have good evidence now that wearing a mask, really does reduce transmission. So, for kids who are well by day six, after being diagnosed with covid-19, they can come back, but they do need to wear a mask for day sixth through ten.”

Kindergarten through 12th-grade schools are required to provide timely testing for COVID-19 for students and staff who desire to be tested, and state law says all COVID-19 cases, outbreaks and suspected outbreaks in a school are to be reported to the local health department.

Other details of the new guidance can be found at doh.wa.gov.