Ky. superintendent closes schools due to COVID-19: ‘This will be a tough year.’

Lee County Public Schools will be closed Monday through Wednesday after a surge in COVID-19 cases, Superintendent Sarah Wasson said.

The district in Beattyville is one of the first in Kentucky to shut down this school year due to the coronavirus.

“This will be a tough year and we don’t want to have to shut down this early. But if we can determine who is positive now, we believe we can stay in school longer,” Wasson said in a statement released Sunday night.

She said people in the district are navigating “this new Delta variant of COVID-19 together.”

“Last week, we had a good start to the school year, but we did experience cases of COVID in both student and staff populations,” Wasson said.

She said one kindergarten student, one first-grader, and one student in 4th grade have tested positive and the students who were within 6 feet for more than 15 minutes of those students have been contacted and asked to quarantine. Five staff members in the district have tested positive.

“While this is not a huge number, the number of staff that have had to quarantine or are not feeling well and will be tested ... is above 17 at the elementary school alone,” Wasson said.

“With this many staff out and new cases having been reported this weekend,” she said the three-day closing was necessary to allow time for new test results to come in and for quarantined employees to be tested and possibly return on Thursday.

The latest available Kentucky Department of Education data shows that there are 877 students in the district.

Anthony Lockard, the regional health department leader, told Wasson that sufficient rapid COVID tests had been delivered to the Lee County Health Department this week, Wasson said.

“If your child does test positive for COVID, please call the central office as soon as you get the results so we can work to determine if others will have to quarantine,” Wasson told families in the statement. “Keeping communication between families and the school will be key to us being able to remain open this school year.”

With the statewide spike in cases resembling the previous worst days of the roughly 16-month pandemic, Gov. Andy Beshear last week mandated that all people inside Kentucky schools wear masks.