District leaders can turn to a leading medical school for guidance and best practices on bringing students and teachers back to classrooms safely even as COVID continues to spread.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine has released a series of online modules on reducing COVID risks as administrators reopen classrooms and other school facilities.
“The goal of these modules is to provide schools and districts with accessible, practical strategies to help them tackle the responsibility of school reopening that minimizes risk of transmission,” said Sara Johnson, associate professor and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Consortium for School-Based Health Solutions. “The modules can also help them identify gaps in their current plans.”
The modules do not offer guidance on whether a district can reopen. Community transmissions and each district’s resources should guide that decision, the university says.
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The series of online and self-paced educational modules and videos covers are designed to help superintendents and their teams craft a plan to minimize the risk of COVID transmission.
The series covers public health strategies such as:
- How COVID-19 is transmitted in schools
- How to implement public health mitigation strategies like face coverings, distancing, and cohorting
- COVID-19 screening types and strategies
- COVID-19 testing strategies
- Monitoring COVID-19 inside and outside of school, including data schools need to track
- Communicating with stakeholders about COVID-19
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