KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Park Hill School District has announced several changes to its COVID-19 protocols for the upcoming school semester, including that masks will no longer be required.
"Because children and adults now have the opportunity to be vaccinated, we will strongly encourage everyone to wear masks, but we will no longer enforce mask-wearing starting in January," the district said in an email. "We will still require masks on school buses, in compliance with the federal requirement that currently goes through March 18, 2022."
Park Hill had previously decided to keep its requirement until the end of the first half of the school year, but said it would revisit the issue for the second semester.
Quarantine related protocols will also change for the upcoming semester.
"Starting in January, the Kansas City Health Department and the Platte County Health Department will take back the contact tracing duties when a Park Hill student or employee has a positive case of COVID-19," the district said. "We will let families and staff know if there is a positive case in their building. We will also provide a message to families if there is someone with Covid in any of your child’s classrooms. It will be the health departments that will let you know if there needs to be a time of quarantine."
Park Hill said it would continue to require any person who tested positive for COVID-19 to stay home for 10 days and will continue to release data about cases in the district on the district's Covid dashboard.
The district will also start to allow some volunteers back inside schools.
"We still need to minimize the number of outside people in our schools, but starting in January, we will start to allow some volunteers," the district said. "This will include guest speakers, volunteers during the school day who do not have any contact with students, and volunteers for after-school clubs or activities who are never left alone with students."
