During March’s regular meeting of the Sealy ISD Board of Trustees, Special Programs Director Mary Gajewski gave a presentation related to COVID-19 and relayed survey results from parents, staff and students.

Superintendent Bryan Hallmark said the three groups were asked how they felt about the district changing mask policies and about 77% of the parents said to keep the same protocols and 72% of the staff were in the same boat. Although a little more than 50% of the students surveyed wanted to move away from the masks, the superintendent provided an example where contact tracing has far-reaching impacts.

“One of the examples I shared with (the board) was that right before Spring Break, we had a staff member who found out they were positive. When we did contact tracing, without the masks, they would have been in close contact with 146 people,” Hallmark said. “We really need that guidance to change before we feel good about doing anything different.”

With only eight weeks left in the school calendar, Hallmark said the pandemic protocols that have been in place all year will remain in effect. He also said that he expected staff members who want to be vaccinated will be able to accomplish that by the middle of this month.

“Right now, we have about 126 staff members that have taken an advantage of vaccines and we’ve got another batch that will be vaccinated next week,” Hallmark said last Thursday. “We feel like by mid-April, anyone who wants to – staff wise in the district – will have been able to be fully vaccinated if that’s what they choose.”

Both of the actionable items on the agenda were approved where the superintendent was given authority to make emergency purchases in excess of $25,000 related to the winter storm and an additional speech pathologist was approved for the special education department.

“There were a couple of things that were pretty big items that we’re going to have an opportunity to get some insurance coverage on or even funds from the state on, but we need to be able to move quickly when we do,” Hallmark said of the emergency purchases related to Winter Storm Uri’s effects.

As for the additional special education speech pathologist, Hallmark said the approval of that position will allow the district to end the contract service that has been filling that position and will open up more support.

“We’ve been doing contract services for one of those speech pathologist positions,” Hallmark said. “But our model and our demand has gotten to the point where it just makes more sense, financially, and allows us to have more support, more of the time if we hire another one of our own.”

Also in the wake of the mid-February freeze that canceled school, Hallmark signed a waiver during a March 4 special meeting to apply for those days missed although extra minutes and days were already built into the schedule in case of emergencies such as those.

“The state was basically forgiving the days that we were out, we wouldn’t have to make up due to the winter storm and we wouldn’t have had to make those up anyway because we have surplus days and hours,” Hallmark said. “In case something else comes up, if we have more severe weather or whatever that is, we went ahead and did it but we had to take action on that before we went on Spring Break, because the day before Spring Break was a bad weather day.”

In other action, Hallmark said contracts were approved for district-level employees to wrap up March’s meeting. The Sealy ISD Board of Trustees will meet next April 28.