Penns Valley will close the high school the rest of this week due to COVID-19. Here’s what we know
A day after the Penns Valley Area Elementary and Intermediate School temporarily shut down due to COVID-19, the high school has now announced it’s following suit.
According to both school communications director Nate Althouse and a Wednesday email sent to parents, the Penns Valley Area Junior-Senior High School will be closed for in-person learning — and switch to remote learning — the rest of this week after suffering a half-dozen student cases there since April 5. It will reopen Monday, along with the elementary and intermediate school, which closed Tuesday.
The other schools in the district — Centre Hall Elementary and Miles Township Elementary — will continue as usual.
“What I would like the community to know is that Penns Valley has done a good job of keeping our students in school and keeping them safe,” Superintendent Brian Griffith said. “The protocols we used in the fall are the same we’re using now, and we need to continue to be vigilant about those protocols because the virus we’re seeing today is slightly different than the one in the fall.”
Based on updated guidelines from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, medium-sized schools in communities with substantial spread — such as Centre County — are recommended to close for several days when they have at least four cases in the same building over the previous two weeks. According to Griffith, the high school has experienced six such cases since returning from Easter break.
Since April 1, according to a dashboard which also includes infected students that never entered the district’s buildings, the high school has had 15 total student cases and two staff cases while the elementary/intermediate school accumulated 11 student cases and one staff case.
By comparison, the district’s Centre Hall and Miles Township schools currently have just three combined active cases.
“As much as everyone is probably up to their ears with masks and the separation and the obstruction to everyday life that COVID has had, we’re just not there yet,” Althouse added. “We’re close, but we still got to stay the course and stay on top of this.”
It is the first time this calendar year that Penns Valley has been forced to close. Since Jan. 4, it has operated completely in-person while uninterrupted — but this month’s spike has been difficult to overlook. From Jan. 19 to March 29, there were nine cases involving high school students and staff. In the past eight days, there’s also been nine such cases.
All athletic events and practices scheduled from Thursday through Sunday have been canceled. But all activities will resume as scheduled Monday, after the school has been disinfected.
Fortunately for the community, the state Department of Health still gave the district the green light to continue on with Friday’s appointment-only vaccination clinic inside the high school gym.
Because the gym operates on a separate HVAC system, and because it will be sanitized before and after the event, a state epidemiologist approved the Penns Valley clinic. A second Pfizer dose will still be administered to those who have appointments.
To date, the Penns Valley Area School District has 34 active COVID-19 cases and 156 resolved cases. Centre County has tallied 15,431 overall cases — and currently has the 10th-highest incidence rate in the commonwealth, meaning a high number of COVID-19 cases per capita over the most-recent seven-day period.
