From stopping potential spread to food distribution issues, much of the Dec. 13 Waterloo School Board meeting was spent discussing weathering yet another pandemic storm. 

In keeping with the county’s increasing COVID-19 numbers, Waterloo School Superintendent Brian Charron said the district has seen an increase of students turning up COVID-positive. 

“Prior to Thanksgiving, and even the Monday after Thanksgiving, our COVID numbers district wide – and we have close to 2,700 kids – had been hovering at 4 or 5 positive cases in the district,” Charron said. “After Thanksgiving, we had jumped to 17 positive cases last Monday and we are at 16 positive cases (last Monday).” 

As Monroe County Health Department Administrator John Wagner said, this increase is largely due to large gatherings from the holidays as well as students not being able to spend time outdoors. 

Charron noted that while there is a larger number of students being excluded from schools, much of the transmission does not seem to be in schools. In other words, most students are exposed and subsequently infected with the disease from contacts outside of school. 

Of the 16 cases, only one student was deemed a close contact due to exposure at school. 

Yet, a few weeks ago, Charron said the uptick in cases led to a few rare in-class exposures that caused a large number of close contacts to be excluded at Zahnow Elementary. 

After the meeting, Charron said the district has been facing another COVID concern unrelated to the aforementioned instances. 

“We’ve recently had an unfortunate situation of parents sending children to school when they knew their kids were close contacts, and (they) sent them anyway, and there were a couple of situations where those kids then tested positive and we continued to plead to parents, ‘when your children are sick, please keep them home for the sake of everyone else.’ We don’t want to have to cause unnecessary quarantines of other students,” Charron said. 

Once again, the school district recently received a message from Kohl Wholesale, their main food supplier, that the Omicron variant is causing the company to quarantine more employees than normal. Thus, they are struggling to find enough drivers to make regularly-scheduled deliveries. 

Charron told the school board that in response, the district is placing larger orders to ensure they have enough food if the trucks cannot come on a normal basis. 

U.S. Foods, another major food supplier, also told Waterloo it also is grappling with a labor shortage, resulting in fear that impact deliveries.

Illinois Central School Bus is still in need of five drivers, Cynthia French, the company’s contract manager, told the R-T. 

Charron said there is also a shortage of cafeteria workers and encouraged anybody willing to help – whether it be on a volunteer basis or if they are seeking employment – to contact the district. 

Now, the cafeterias are enlisting all the help they can get, and administrators and staff are leading the all-hands-on-deck effort. 

“There (are) enough cafeteria workers to still get the food prepared, but when hundreds of kids come in the door to be fed, it takes more people,” Charron said. “(Administrators’) job description is limitless, it’s ‘do what is not being done,’ and in every building they are stepping up and working shifts in the cafeteria  … so I’m very thankful to them and anyone else who is also helping.” 

Schools across the state are seeing lower test scores. Curriculum Coordinator John Schmieg presented a fact sheet to the board Monday giving insight into these figures. To read more, click here.

He was careful, however, to stress that the district had some great feats among the hardships.  

“99 percent of our teachers – even during the pandemic – had 10 days or less missed,” Schmieg said. “Now, I highlight that because that is a number that is not typical of school districts during the pandemic. In fact, I had difficulty finding another school district that had that high of teacher attendance rates, so that’s something to be proud of.” 

Charron also presented board committee reports at the meeting. The building grounds committee is making headway on selecting a new architect. 

“We’re involved currently in the process of identifying a new architect firm for the district. There were six firms that had responded to our request for qualifications. We’ve interviewed two of those firms and have another firm to get rescheduled that had to be postponed. But that building grounds committee will be resuming that over the next two weeks probably,” Charron said. 

The policy committee has also been reviewing the November addition of Press Plus. 

“Press Plus is a policy service provided by the Illinois State Association of School Boards to help school districts keep all of their policies current and up-to-date with existing law and best practices,” Charron explained. 

Essentially, the district gets notified as changes in the law arise that will impact their policies. Sometimes this may require a new policy must be added or amendments to existing rules. 

On Monday, the board did its first reading of policies outlined in Press Plus Issue 108, giving teachers, other staff and the community notice of its contents. 

Charron said the board will conduct a second reading and decide whether to adopt these policies at the January meeting. 

The board also adopted a resolution for the supplemental savings plan for members of the Teacher Retirement System. 

“This is not something that we are choosing to do locally. This is a required action. The Teachers’ Retirement System is setting up the supplemental savings plan that everyone who is a member of TRS will be getting information about soon,” Charron explained. “They will have an option to contribute more than the minimum if they would like to into a savings plan that would be run by TRS. School districts have until some date in February to have this up and running.”

The debt committee is discussing purchasing new cameras for surveillance at the high school and middle school. 

The $877,000 track and turf field replacement project at Waterloo High School is officially complete, with all subsequent paperwork being finished, Charron reported. 

The next Waterloo School Board meeting will take place at 7 p.m. Jan. 24 at Gardner Elementary School.