By Tim Mastro

WILMINGTON — Gov. John Carney announced Tuesday a one-time mask distribution to the state’s schools as Delaware State Education Association president Stephanie Ingram called upon school districts to assess their operational capacity amid the current COVID-19 surge.

Masks will be distributed to Delaware’s public, private and parochial schools and child care providers through school and child care liaisons. They will be for students in sixth grade and older, due to the size of the masks, as well as educators and staff.

Districts, charter schools, private schools and child care facilities will receive 125,000 KN95 masks from the state to support their in-person instruction efforts. Schools and child care facilities will make the KN95 masks available to staff members as needed or requested. Child care providers will need to pre-register through a link that will be sent from the Delaware Department of Education. If the email with the registration link is not received by the close of business Wednesday, assistance with registration is available by emailing mask.distribution@doe.k12.de.us.

Gov. Carney said during his weekly COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday the state has no plans to distribute masks elsewhere.

“We decided to focus on our schools because it is our highest priority to keep children in schools,” Gov. Carney said.

Mask distribution was one of the requests Ms. Ingram said DSEA members made Tuesday in their statement regarding school challenges.

She also requested “all COVID cleaning precautions to be resumed, adequate support to meet increased needs of educators/paras, nurses, transportation, and custodians, and for each district to create a plan to address operational challenges and to communicate in an effective and transparent manner with the entire school community they serve.”

Several school districts have been affected by staff shortages in recent weeks because of positive COVID-19 cases which have forced some to switch to virtual learning.

Lake Forest has its high school operating under remote learning until Friday. Smyrna is resuming in-person learning today after a couple of virtual days, New Castle County Vo-Tech was remote all of last week and Delmar had a half-day of school Jan. 10 due to quarantine concerns. Capital School District also briefly went to virtual learning earlier this month before resuming in-person instruction.

Numerous other school districts have asked students and teachers to be prepared to make alternative plans, by bringing home instructional devices daily in case a last-minute shift to remote learning is necessary due to staffing shortages.

“Educators in Delaware’s public schools came back from winter break to an environment that was unlike the one they left in December,” Ms. Ingram said in a written statement released Tuesday. “We have been meeting and talking to DSEA members over the last two weeks, and what we are hearing is concerning, to say the least. Now, let me be clear from the very beginning, I am not writing this to suggest that all schools should return to virtual learning environments. What I am doing, on behalf of my members, is asking for changes to be made to combat the operational challenges being faced in order to keep our students, staff, and entire school communities safe. For some districts, that may be to return to virtual learning if necessary — and some have done that already. But, for many districts there are changes that can be made to provide a quality and safe in-person learning environment for all.”

She continued, “Our members have returned to their schools and found the winter surge of COVID depleting the resources that were already limited and insufficient. If we want to keep our students learning in-person we need to make sure that we do it in a safe and effective manner. There is a huge deficit in the number of professionals available to keep schools operating in the manner they need to be. Each school district has received an influx of money through the American Rescue Plan. We are asking that this money be used to help solve the operational capacity issues in our schools.”

To help with staff shortages at schools, Gov. Carney eased regulations earlier this month related to recently retired state employees returning to the classroom as substitute teachers.

Under this revision, Delaware pensioners may accept positions as substitute teachers after only a one-month separation of state service, instead of the previous requirement of six months. Additionally, service as a substitute teacher will not count toward the annual earnings limit of $30,000 for pensioners in a state-funded position.

Gov. Carney added the state held recent talks about deploying the Delaware National Guard to help with non-educational functions in schools, although that appears to be unlikely as Guard members are training to be certified nursing assistants in hospitals to aid with record numbers of admissions.

“That’s still something that we’re looking at but it doesn’t look as promising as it once did,” Gov. Carney said. “We’re very focused on the decompression deployment in our hospitals.”

The Delaware Division of Public Health reported 119 in-person contagious cases of COVID-19 in public schools for the week of Jan. 1-7 — the most recent available data. This total, which represents 0.08% of the estimated 141,040 public school students this academic year, is the lowest for a week school has been in session, though some districts had as many as three days off because of a winter storm during this time.

There has been a total of 5,587 in-person positive cases among students this school year (3.9%) and an additional 1,235 among staff.

“This pandemic has exacerbated staffing and substitute shortages,” Ms. Ingram said in her letter. “Schools are using paraprofessionals to cover classrooms, monitor students, and provide instruction, as well as Specialized Instructional Support Personnel (like counselors, librarians, and social workers) having to cover classes when a substitute is unavailable. In some instances, multiple classes of students are being placed in cafeterias or auditoriums at the same time with a singular staff member rather than having class because of coverage issues. Students are arriving late to school because the lack of transportation workers is causing bus drivers to make multiple, back-to-back runs each day. In some cases, they are also driving special needs buses without the assistance of bus aides.”

Ms. Ingram added, “School COVID cleaning protocols are not being kept up with due to the limited number of daytime custodians available. This is on top of the fact that there is limited access to the necessary COVID testing in school sites because of the new five-day return period and increased need for testing. Our school nurse workloads are overwhelming and unreasonable due to the increased COVID workload on top of their regular duties. The operational challenges of keeping our schools open is growing by the day. Just keeping students in school is not the quality instructional experience we all expect it to be.”

“We are cognizant of those issues that the DSEA mentioned in that letter and we are on regular contact with superintendents to hear the situation in each of their districts,” Gov. Carney said. “The one consistent thing is that each district is different.”