The Oregon School Nurses Association has worked with school nurses, districts, and health departments across Oregon to offer the following tools as examples/templates for districts to customize to their own policies and protocols and consider incorporating into their own return to school operational blueprints or Comprehensive Communicable Disease Management Plans. Anyone using these free tools does so with the understanding that they should run any final versions of documents made using these templates through their district legal advisor to reduce potential liability, and that OSNA or the specific creators of these tools that are offered free of charge to the public make no specific or implied guarantees of their compliance with applicable laws or guidelines. We sincerely hope that these tools might simply give districts a space to view what other schools are planning to use in their own back to school blueprints or protocols.
If you are a non-nurse educator from a district which does not have school nursing, please contact OSNA for support using these tools. Click here to
email Wendy Niskanen.
The resources in the toolkit are divided into the following key topic areas:
- Communicable Disease Management Plans
- Communicable Disease Management Plans are important documents that operationalize the legal requirements and guidelines for disease prevention and mitigation in the school setting. School districts are obliged to have Communicable Disease Management Plans in place and often partner documents that address exposure control and emergency planning. Provided are some plan exemplars with the first being for individual school districts that function with local health services departments, the second being representative of districts that have health services provided through an Education Service District.
- Cohort Tracking
- Cohorting and tracking of cohorting is a strong public health strategy to potentially limit the scope of quarantining. A variety of considerations about scope of quarantining are the responsibility of school administrators. These tools aim to provide information in regards to the interaction of cohorts and staff in the school setting.
- Contact Tracing Tools
- Contract tracing tools support the identification of which students, staff or other individuals were in close contact with a COVID-19 positive individual. These tools look at factors that impact the LPHA decision to contact. In some situations schools provide this data to support contact tracing. Accurate contact tracing data can potentially limit the scope of a quarantine.
- Communication Resources for Families and School Communities
- ODE/OHA’s Ready Schools, Safe Learners guidance requires schools to “Develop a letter or communication to staff to be shared at the start of on-site instruction and at periodic intervals explaining infection control measures that are being implemented to prevent spread of disease.“ (section 1b) and to “Communicate any information related to reentry for the 2020-21 school year to multilingual families in a language they can understand about any program, service, or activity that is called to the attention of parents who are proficient in English.” (section 6b) . Many districts will choose to accomplish this over multiple communications.
- COVID-19 Testing in Schools
- Oregon Health Authority is supporting schools with 3 COVID-19 testing programs. Testing Program Memo provides an overview of these. Registration links for these programs are found in the OHA Schools COVID-19 testing program memo.
- Decision Making Documents
- Google Form Directions
- For schools that might not want to have an editable spreadsheet available to several employees at once. A Google form can be used to populate a spreadsheet of the compiled data, maintaining confidentiality, and reducing accidental corruption of the data.
- Google Sheet Directions
- Google Spreadsheets may be used to track activity in the building for a variety of purposes, such as office sign in or sign in within a particular classroom. Google spreadsheet information is accessible to all of those with editing and viewing privileges, so this must be kept in mind
- Health and Isolation Room Resources
- PPE
- Spreadsheet to help schools determine possible school purchasing needs to comply with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) requirements in the return to school guidance, and to comply with existing OSHA laws regarding protection of staff in positions that put them at high risk of exposure to the body fluids of others while at work.
- Symptom Monitoring
- Ready Schools, Safe Learners guidance requires schools to “Record and monitor the students and staff being isolated or sent home.” (Section 1i) In order to stay informed of illness trends and possible outbreaks, schools should track 1) students absent because of specific symptoms, and 2) track students or staff present – and then sent home - with specific symptoms noted. Existing systems such as confidential health room logs may be modified for this purpose, to include tracking of parent phone calls to the front office explaining absence due to illness. Regardless of the reason for visiting the health room, a log should be maintained of individuals who spent time in the health room or isolation space each school day, to be included with the other cohort tracking logs used to inform the health department for contact-tracing needs.
- Staff Training Presentation
- Ready Schools, safe Learners guidance requires schools to “Train all staff on updated protocols, policies, and guidelines to adhere to physical distancing requirements and recommendations outlined in this guidance and the Operational Blueprint for Reentry.” (section 8b). The example provided can be modified and adapted for a particular district.
- When to Stay Home Algorithms
- These resources are to help communicate to parents (and staff) when to stay home. It is important to recognize this information for both COVID-19 and typical childhood illnesses.
- Archived COVID-19 Toolkit 2020-2021