Dear Wornick Community,

In the past few weeks, the number of individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 in our community has increased. This has included siblings and parents but also several professionals and students. In the last two weeks, 9 professionals and students tested positive and this morning we already reported another two cases to two different classes. As of now, a number of classes at Wornick have been exposed and are masking and undergoing extra testing through the next week. Although our routine PCR testing has been successful in catching cases, the vast majority of cases have emerged through antigen testing following symptoms presenting.

Symptoms for our community members have been mild to moderate, and we are sending a Refuah Shlemah (speedy recovery) for all community members who are recovering from COVID now. The impact of getting COVID-19 continues to be very disruptive for classes and students. It is not ideal to miss 5-10 days of school at this point in the school year. It is challenging for parents to miss work to support the isolation of their positive students, especially with cascading spread through numerous siblings in a household. So many classes have significant milestone events coming up that we have planned for in person that we want our students to be able to attend.

We have made the decision to remask all students and professionals indoors through the end of this week. We do hope that this move will be temporary as we believe that the benefits of unmasking are significant for our students. Our hope is to return to our mask optional policy as soon as possible and we will update the community before Monday, May 16th on the mask policy.

Our health and safety advisors have recommended thinking about masking like the use of an umbrella. When it is raining, we open up the umbrella to protect us from the rain and when the weather is better we can put the umbrella away. In San Mateo County, like other Bay Area counties, we recently moved back into the moderate tier of community spread. We will of course watch our community numbers closely as well as those in the larger community to determine next steps.

In health and partnership,
Adam Eilath