Superintendent presents survey results to joint meeting of Assembly and School Board

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly held a joint meeting with the Mat-Su Borough School District at the MSBSD district office on Tuesday. While no schools are currently closed due to COVID-19 outbreaks, 26 out of 47 schools have entered the medium risk category that requires students and staff to wear masks. There were 24 new cases announced among students and staff on Wednesday with 180 over the last week. There have been over 1,000 cases of student and staff thus far in the 2021 fall semester.

“I have been calling COVID the great distraction and the great divider. Last year staff and parents did something amazing, they kept the palace open and I know everyone is tired of COVID, I certainly am. I wish it was done with us, it’s not. I do think we can do something amazing again this year and part of it is giving COVID the attention it needs but not letting it define us, not letting it be the only thing or the most important thing. School is the most important thing,” said MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani.

While 44.7 % of MSBSD schools do not have a mask requirement, 55.3 % of schools do. At Wasilla Middle School, four new cases were announced on Wednesday with 15 over the last week. At Palmer Junior Middle School, two cases were reported Wednesday with 13 over the last seven days. Trani also addressed the ongoing bus route rolling cancelations. Trani said that First Student, the bus contractor for the district, is working on hiring more drivers. Free vaccination clinics have been offered to drivers, and drivers are required to wear masks as well as socially distance at the bus barn on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

“We’ve had to do rolling transportation cancellations because of driver shortages and we are not the only school in the state who is dealing with this. Most of them are dealing with it and we’re certainly not the only ones in the country, it sounds like over 90 % of the districts in the country are dealing with driver shortages,” said Trani. “We hope that they can get enough drivers, they certainly are trying. They have a huge financial incentive to do so because when they can’t deliver our students according to the contract, they lose money, but unfortunately they are losing drivers to COVID as fast as they are gaining drivers so that’s why it’s continuing.”

Trani also released the results of a poll of over 5,000 people on masks in schools. There were 795 teachers who responded and 4,609 parents. Respondents were able to choose yes, no, or depending on the circumstances whether or not they would be in favor of masks continuing to be worn in schools. While 51 % of teachers said that they wanted masks, the other 49 % were split with 25 % who responded “depends” and 24 % who responded “no.” Parents were overwhelmingly in opposition to masks, with 47 % of respondents answering “no” that they did not want their students to have to wear masks. There were 20 % of parents who responded “depends” and 33 % who responded yes.

“It’s very, very, very split. I think that our plan represents that in our community we’re trying to strike the middle ground. It’s not masks all the time, it’s masks when the transmission is high and there is no way when you have data like this that you’re going to meet everybody where they’re at. We’re too far apart,” said Trani.

Trani also noted that student absences are much higher than they were last year, attributing that to a multitude of factors.

“Some of those days when we had 30 % of our entire student body out. We had individual schools with more than half of the students not there. It makes it really hard to do that most important thing that I want to talk more about and less about COVID is school, it’s just hard to pull that off when half your kids, we’re averaging roughly about a quarter a little less than a quarter of our kids a day are not making it to school compared to last year when it was closer to 10 % through this time period,” said Trani.