Episode Details

Superintendent:
Welcome to the Supercast and to a brand new year, 2021. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. As we begin the new year, Jordan School District is following some new state COVID-19 guidelines, quarantine procedures, and plans for students who wish to participate in athletics and other extracurricular activities. On this episode, I'm joined by several colleagues involved in our ongoing COVID safety plans together. We hope to help students, teachers, staff, and parents better understand the changes in COVID-19 protocol that will impact our schools moving forward. All right, we are here with Caleb Olsen, our Planning and Enrollment Consultant, Brad Sorenson, the Administrator of Schools over High Schools, and Mike Anderson, our Associate Superintendent to talk about moving forward and where we stand with the pandemic in a new calendar year. It's amazing that we're in 2021. And there's just been a little bit of a mind shift as we look toward the remainder of the year.

There've been some changes in procedure at the District level and at the State level, since we last talked about this on the Supercast. So I invited these gentlemen back to talk about some of the changes and how they're impacting students, families, and employees. Caleb, let's start with you and talk about the Dashboard.  First off, the Dashboard has been very popular. We have a lot of visits to the Dashboard, that updates case counts and quarantine counts. Tell us about that.

Caleb:
Absolutely. We've had the Dashboard up since about the end of September. And right now we're seeing between 1,002 thousand views a day of patrons and community members coming to get information on their schools altogether. The Moving Forward site with the Dashboard and all of the Districts COVID-19 information has been viewed just under 370,000 times since it went live in August, that's a higher level of engagement.

Superintendent:
And I really appreciate all the work that goes into providing and updating information on that site. There have been some changes to the way we report that. And one of the big changes that we've had questions about is the reset after we've been out for two weeks for the holiday break. Can you tell us about the reset and some of the ways that the information on the Dashboard has evolved?

Caleb:
Absolutely. The reset happened because of our return from winter recess. And I think everyone in the District needed that winter recess and that time off to kind of recover and recharge. But what that winter recess meant is there were no classes being held. So there were no opportunities for students to interact with those who might've had positive cases. There were no situations where we needed to quarantine new students.

Because of, and at the direction of the Salt Lake County Health Department, when we came back from winter recess, we reset all of our quarantine and our case totals to zero because any of the existing quarantines would have ended and any of the existing positive cases would have run through their course. It would have been more than 14 days and they would have been able to be back in school or back to work. So when we returned, we reset all of those numbers to zero. That meant the Dashboard had a few changes in the way it looks, and it may be a little different to people. But the main information is still there prior to winter recess, because we had schools who were going to