Lincoln Prep School declines quarantine rule change for now

Like the local public school district, Lincoln Preparatory School will not be adopting the state’s new “parent choice” model for quarantining students exposed to COVID-19.

“We’re not planning to make any changes right now,” Lincoln Prep Executive Director Gordan Ford said Tuesday. “School is going to be out next week, so we may take a look at that and talk some more about it then.”

Last week the Louisiana Department of Education announced a change to its previous COVID requirements that would allow parents to decide whether or not to quarantine their children at home if exposed to a positive case of the respiratory virus.

But it’s a system-bysystem, opt-in change. Both the Lincoln Parish School District and the Grambling-based public charter school Lincoln Prep have thus far elected not to move away from the previous 10-day quarantine requirement for those deemed “close contacts” to a positive case.

“(The change) is really geared more toward some schools where the parents are really resistant to COVID protocols,” Ford said. “We’ve not really had that problem at our school in Lincoln Parish. Our parents are pretty supportive of the COVID protocols, and they’re glad that we take a pretty hard line on them to try to make sure we’re keeping everybody safe.”

The current 10-day quarantine window for students and employees exposed to COVID can be shortened to returning on the eighth day if a negative COVID test is obtained between days five and seven.

Ford said employees are taking this option, but for the most part the school is sticking with 10 days for students to make things more consistent and understandable for parents.

When announcing the parent choice option, State Superintendent Cade Brumley said the main reason for the change was that some schools were seeing students repeatedly have to miss time for quarantines, leading to more learning loss due to inconsistency of environment.

Like the public school system, Ford said that hasn’t been too much of a problem at Lincoln Prep.

“We have not had a lot of multiples,” he said. We have had one grade level who had to be quarantined twice that we were a little bit concerned about. But we’ve made sure we’ve worked with parents to try to make sure those kids don’t experience as much learning loss and trying to mitigate that as much as we can.”

Since the announcement of the new option, Gov. John Bel Edwards, the Louisiana Department of Health, and members of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have said they were not consulted about the change and don’t approve of it.

Ford said as far as COVID is concerned, Lincoln Prep’s main focus is encouraging parents to vaccinate their children who are eligible for the shot and to use caution in offcampus activity.

“Most of the positive cases that we see are usually on Monday or Tuesday and are due to things that families are doing on the weekends and just not exercising enough caution,” Ford said. “That’s the thing we try to emphasize.”