Hi, all,
Just wanted to let you know about a few ways that the work continues.
1. Petition: I've pulled the complete list of signatories to get to Superintendent Degner and all school board members before tonight's meeting. (I also emailed it to them last week).
They could still issue a mask requirement, though at this point it seems unlikely. According to Heather Cox Richardson's Letter from an American this morning,
"Florida governor Ron DeSantis is standing firm on his refusal to permit mask mandates in schools, but the situation has gotten so bad that six school districts that together enroll more than a million students have passed mask mandates anyway. On Friday, the staunchly Republican Sarasota County joined the five Democratic districts of Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Alachua counties to require masks in schools."
(Admittedly Iowa's legislation makes us slightly different from the situation in Florida. However, the virus is the same. The illness is the same. The hospitalizations are the same. And dying is dying, whether in Iowa or Florida.)
2. Separate Law Suit: There is a law suit to overturn the mask ban (separate from this petition drive and not based in ICCSD), based on the federal requirement that all students are entitled to a free and appropriate public education. I've donated, and you can also donate to support it here: https://www.franparr.com/?fbclid=IwAR2qjX7LRc0L8Ij1d4NolfmhM1-qR17NGgOM7VIf2fWWDjqOA9Ro5T4x0qU
3. District infection estimator -- can you help? Fran Mierswa posted a district infection estimator in Science for Safe Schools (see details below). Could any of you use it to estimate rates for ICCSD and keep the group posted? You can reach us at ICProtectKidsCommunity@gmail.com. Here's the estimator post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/539659640614524/posts/544711590109329
Details on estimator from person who originally posted:
Estimator based on COVSIM model for unmasked, untested school populations.
1. Get school-specific K-12 info from 2020-2021 Iowa Dept of Ed enrollment data.
1. Input enrollment data into spreadsheet for school-specific estimates of total infections in single (107 day) semester. There is some extrapolations for hospitalizations, but they are based on the “old” Covid variants and Delta appears in some areas of the world to track to the higher side.
I have done some color matching to make it easy to see how the source data and estimator match.