State Gives Greenlight For In-Class Learning To All Counties

The State of Maine website has released its first round of county color codes.

At this time, all of the state's sixteen counties has been coded GREEN.  That means that every school in the state should be able to return with some form of in-person learning.  That is, assuming all of the safety precautions can enacted.

Some of the safety precautions include: all staff wearing face coverings, children five and older wearing face coverings (but, it is recommended that kids two and old wear masks when possible) in class, face coverings must be worn on the bus, students must be taught the proper way to wash their hands, everyone must conduct a symptom check before entering school (or getting on a bus), and each school must have a "medical isolation" room for those who exhibit symptoms throughout the day.

Earlier this month, it was announced that, depending on a variety of criteria, each county would be coded by color.Green means schools may return to in-person learning if specific guidelines set by the state can be implemented.  Yellow means schools should adopt a hybrid method of in-person and remote learning.  Red means schools should only conduct remote learning.

According to WMTW, the coding criteria is based on:

"recent data on case rates, positivity rates, and syndromic data (e.g., symptoms of influenza or COVID-19). The categorizations are just one piece of information to help inform the decisions of school and district leaders. The categorizations will be updated every two weeks."

If the State of Maine sticks to the plan that was initially outlined on July 17th, we should an updated list of codes on August 14th.

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