Mat-Su students return to school

MAT-SU — Across the Mat-Su Valley, students will be attending their first day of school on Wednesday at 46 Mat-Su Borough School District school buildings.

After the first day of school, the MSBSD School Board will hold a meeting at the district office at 6 p.m. As of the last school board meeting on August 4, 16,151 students had registered for school and 86 percent of those students would be attending classes in person.

“Typically our largest increase will be next week so with these numbers at this point we’re feeling pretty confident that we’re going to get to the number that we had projected I guess time will see,” said MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani. “It’s a little like watching fish data for coho on the Little Su or something like that, how is the run going to come in this year. At this point it looks like it’s coming in really well.”

The district holds five staffed teacher positions in reserve to allocate to schools where an excess amount of students may necessitate additional staffing at the last minute.

“We could end up in that scramble where we’re trying to hire at the last minute, which frankly is a much better problem to have than needing to lay people off at the last minute. So point well taken the earlier we get the information from people that are listening the better,” said Trani. “We’re feeling pretty confident at this point that we’re going to hit that 19,000 and change number.”

Trani announced earlier this month that masks would not be required for students at MSBSD schools while the COVID-19 threat level is at “green” with low community transmission. The MSBSD leadership and local public health officials will again meet as a Health Advisory Team to review the daily COVID-19 transmission and provide guidance to appropriate school response efforts. Each of the 46 schools have posted individual mitigation strategies for students in attendance. The district’s COVID-19 page also features additional information and resources, as well as new tools such as an operational zone, mask requirement and school type filter.

If COVID-19 outbreaks or hotspots are detected in school buildings, masks may be required for individual classrooms or schools, according to the district’s mitigation strategy. Mat-Su Public Health will conduct contact tracing. Unvaccinated students may be required to quarantine if they are deemed close contacts, but fully vaccinated students will not. Buses will continue to run with assigned seating that limits one student per seat where possible and groups families together with additional sanitizing.

While all 46 MSBSD schools are starting at “green,” the state’s new classification of alert levels may change that. The state added “substantial” as an alert level and qualifies high transmission as 100 cases per 100,000 residents over the last seven days. Substantial spread is over 50 cases per 100,000 over a week span, and moderate is between 10 and 50 cases over the last week per 100,000 residents. A low alert level is under 10 cases identified per 100,000 residents over the last week.

In the Mat-Su, there have been 233 new cases over the last seven days, with 43 new cases reported on August 14. The high mark for cases in a day reported in the Mat-Su was 69 on August 4. There have been 12,621 total cases of COVID-19 among Mat-Su residents since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and 64 Mat-Su residents have died from covid.

Across Alaska, there are 30 Intensive Care Unit beds available and 13.1 percent of all hospitalized people are suffering from covid symptoms. In the Mat-Su, there are 14 people currently hospitalized with covid, accounting for 17.5 percent of those hospitalized at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center. There are five ICU beds available at MSRMC.

A total of 53.3 percent of Alaskan residents have been fully vaccinated, while 37.4 percent of Mat-Su residents have been fully vaccinated.