St. Clair County Schools Superintendent Mike Howard said all schools have been seeing low covid numbers in the past few weeks.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) relaxed mask recommendations at the end of February. The agency decided to recommend masks only for areas of high risk of serious illness. Before, it was recommended that all schools follow a mask mandate. However, there has been no formal mask mandates for schools from the state or the CDC this year.

“Everything is fine, we have no more mask mandates and our numbers are less than 10 for the past few weeks. We’ve had almost negligible numbers and we’re, right now, functioning normally,” said Howard.

Howard said the BOE plans to continue to keep the plan in place just in case numbers should rise again. Hes said it’s proven throughout the school year to be very effective in decreases covid numbers among students.

“Covid hasn’t completely gone away and they’re talking about new variants in the future, so we don’t want to eliminate something that has worked so well for us to keep our schools open. It will be there, but we will only need it when we need it,” said Howard.

As of now, Howard said the BOE is focused on moving forward and making it to spring break and then finishing out the year with graduations.

The SCCS BOE will have a regularly scheduled meeting next Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. in the Odenville Middle School auditorium.

The six-step plan for the BOE to keep schools open began in September. It was decided if a certain percentage of the student population became sick with covid, the BOE would follow a procedure in the list appropriate to the outbreak size.

The stages that will be followed when deciding when and how to convert to virtual if needed:

-Stage 1: Traditional school is fully open 5 days per week

-Stage 2: Traditional school is open in staggered format 4 days per week

-Stage 3: Traditional school is open like stage 2, but 9-12 are fully virtual

-Stage 5: Traditional school is open like stage 2, but 4-12 are fully virtual

-Stage 6: No traditional school, all classes are fully virtual.