Page 14 - MAY2022

Page 14 NEWFOUNDLAKELIFE.COM May 2022 Community
Mask-Optional in Newfound Regional School District
By BRittany amalfi
People have been waiting for this day for a long time: the end of the mask mandate. It’s been a long and hard pandemic, and everyone has been hoping for a bit of solace. Well, the Newfound Regional School District got just that on February 14th.
On February 14th, the school board met to discuss the results of the surveys they sent out to families about their opinions on masks. The school board found that the survey results were fairly equal, but a higher percentage
wanted maks to be optional. On that evening, the school board voted to switch to mask optional.
The mask-optional vote would begin right when they returned from February break on March 7th. I had the opportunity to speak with Newfound Regional School District’s Superintendent Pierre Couture. “It was inter- esting because when we voted to make masks optional, we de- layed the start date three weeks, and in those three weeks, cases continued to drop.” He also in- formed me that “the schools are still continuing to follow DHHS
guidelines. If the students have symptoms, they go home and re- turn after they have had a nega- tive test. DHHS is supplying our schools with rapid tests, so if we send a student home, we send them home with a rapid test.”
The overall response to the mask-optional vote has been
positive. After February break, students and staff returned to a mask-optional school, and plenty were happy. “It’s quite a relief,” Couture told me. “Because this is all we’ve been talking about for the past two years. COVID, guidelines, masks, and now it’s not. It almost feels like we’re fi-
nally finding a sense of normalcy. These past two years have been difficult on everyone, but the staff in all of these schools have been extremely hardworking.”
Couture went on to tell me how much the pandemic neg- atively affected the schools and how the hope was dwindling. “We ran three vaccine clinics here last year, and we were hope- ful that we were on the right track with it. We wanted to support our families and the communities with the clinics, and I do believe we did a good job with them. Only, when we tried to pursue mask-optional in September 2021, COVID cases began in- creasing all over the country, so we had to go back to the mask mandate.” The school board understood that they needed to keep their students and staff safe, so they did everything they could to get cases down. “Once we went back to the mask mandate,” Couture informed me, “It helped get cases down. Our goal was to keep our schools open, and we met our goals as we did not have to shut them down.” After the roller coaster ride 2021, New- found Regional School District being able to go back to mask optional this time around was a breath of relief.
When speaking to a few New- found Regional Public Schools teachers, they said similar things. “Things are going well. It’s been really nice to see the student’s faces and their bright smiles. We do encourage students to wear masks if they do not feel com- fortable.”
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