Category: Community

District COVID-19 Active Positive Cases

• Total number of students and staff in isolation (currently positive) for COVID-19: twenty-seven (27)
• Current district facilities with known positive cases: John Cline Elementary, Carrie Lee Elementary, Decorah Middle School, Decorah High School

DCSD reports COVID-19 data in alignment with the direction of the Iowa Department of Public Health. The full guidance can be found at the link below.

IDPH Information Sharing Guidance for Schools and Local Public Health

CDC Guidance for K-12 Schools

As the graph below indicates, the District has experienced this week the largest number of staff or students in isolation due to a positive COVID-19 test. In his weekly message to families, Superintendent Mark Lane shared, “As we strive to provide a consistently safe and healthy working and learning environment, we highly encourage eligible staff and students to be vaccinated. We also highly encourage masking in alignment with CDC guidance. We ask that everyone practice good hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette. We urge individuals to stay home when sick and to communicate with personal health care providers and our school nurses to understand when it is appropriate to return to school.”

At the end of December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their Guidance for COVID-19 Prevention in K-12 Schools. The CDC lists the following key takeaways in the introduction to the new guidance.

Key Takeaways

• Students benefit from in-person learning, and safely returning to in-person instruction continues to be a priority.
• Vaccination is the leading public health prevention strategy to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Promoting vaccination can help schools safely return to in-person learning as well as extracurricular activities and sports.
• CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (ages 2 years and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
• New CDC guidance has reduced the recommended time for isolation and quarantine periods to five days. For details see CDC’s page on Quarantine and Isolation.
• In addition to universal indoor masking, CDC recommends schools maintain at least 3 feet of physical distance between students within classrooms to reduce transmission risk. When it is not possible to maintain a physical distance of at least 3 feet, such as when schools cannot fully reopen while maintaining these distances, it is especially important to layer multiple prevention strategies, such as screening testing.
• Screening testing, ventilation, handwashing and respiratory etiquette, staying home when sick and getting tested, contact tracing in combination with quarantine and isolation, and cleaning and disinfection are also important layers of prevention to keep schools safe.
• Students, teachers, and staff should stay home when they have signs of any infectious illness and should be referred to their healthcare provider for testing and care.
• This guidance emphasizes implementing layered prevention strategies to protect students, teachers, staff, visitors, and other members of their households and support in-person learning.
• Localities should monitor community transmission, vaccination coverage, screening testing, and occurrence of outbreaks to guide decisions on the level of layered prevention strategies (e.g., physical distancing, screening testing).

Superintendent Search

Tuesday evening, the DCSD Board of Directors met with representatives from Grundmeyer Leader Search (GLS), the firm facilitating the superintendent search. The Board will work with GLS to identify finalists, and in-district interviews will occur Monday, February, 7. Finalists will be announced in the days before the interviews.

Decorah High School’s 33^rd Annual Madrigal Dinner will take place on Sunday, January 30 at 5:00 p.m. at Decorah High School. (Those in attendance should please be seated by 4:50 p.m.) Advanced tickets are $25 each and are available online at https://decorahschools.ludus.com/index.php. To pay with cash or check, people can purchase tickets in the DHS office. Tickets will be sold until noon on Wednesday, January 26.

Seating for this event will be tables that will seat six people. Each ticket includes a meal fit for a King or Queen: wassail punch, field greens salad, herbed focaccia bread, roasted loin of pork with chimichurri sauce, mashed red potatoes, steamed green beans and carrots, assorted cheesecake, and coffee. Advanced orders of vegetarian entrées and gluten-free options are available when purchasing tickets.

Guests will be entertained by music of the Renaissance–performed by vocalists and brass–and the presentation of the comedic play “The Truth Fairy.” The public is invited to join the DHS Music Department on a journey to 16th Century England.

For those who do not feel comfortable participating in the Madrigal Dinner meal, general seating tickets are available to watch the program at the back of the hall at a cost of $10 per person.

Please contact Jason Rausch at Decorah High School with any questions.

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January 14, 2022

Decorah, IA – The Decorah Schools Board of Education would like to provide an update on the superintendent hiring process. The board recently met with Dr. Trent Grundmeyer and Roger Wilcox with Grundmeyer Leader Services to review the candidate pool. The position was posted from December l to January 2 and resulted in nineteen candidates.
The candidate pool included one out-of-state candidate. There were seventeen male candidates and two female candidates. Five of the candidates hold a terminal degree (Ed.D. or Ph.D.), while nine have three or more years of administrative experience.
All nineteen candidates were presented to the Board of Education in closed session on January 11. After the review of candidates’ application materials, references, licensure verification, and social media, five candidates were selected for screening interviews that will take place on January 26. The screening process will allow the board to further evaluate the candidates’ qualifications for the position and narrow the process to three finalists.
The search consultants will set up and facilitate the screening interviews and finalists will be publicly named shortly after the screening interviews take place.
The desired qualifications that were identified from the stakeholder survey will continue to drive the hiring process. Those desired qualifications included:

• Is approachable, accessible, and welcoming
• Recruits, hires, supports, develops, and retains effective staff members
• Demonstrates collaborative leadership
• Demonstrates ethics and integrity
• Promotes a community of care and support for students
• Possesses strong communication skills
• Follows through on tasks and responsibilities
• Builds community and school relations
• Strong instructional leader

The board will soon reach out to community members to serve on the team conducting formal interviews with the finalists, which will take place on Monday, Feb. 7. The new superintendent will begin leading the Decorah Community Schools effective July l, 2022.

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