Palmerton Area School District officials said Thursday night the district is complying with the state Department of Health’s order requiring masks inside K-12 buildings for students, staff and visitors.

“Our goals right now are to keep schools open five days a week, keep students from being exposed to or contracting COVID-19, and keep as many students as possible from having to quarantine,” Dr. Jodi Frankelli said in an update to the board and community during Palmerton’s workshop meeting.

Carbon County has been in the “high” COVID-19 community transmission category since the Aug. 9-15 reporting period and has the fourth highest PCR testing positivity rate and incident rate per 100,000 in the state.

The school district’s numbers, Frankelli said, have reflected the data that the delta variant has a greater impact on children.

“We had 75 COVID-19 cases in the district all of last year,” she said. “To date in 2021-22, we have had 30 cases and only two of those have been employees.”

Complying with the state’s universal mask mandate has, she added, limited the amount of students who have needed to quarantine.

“If we weren’t wearing masks, there would be probably somewhere around 200 students in quarantine,” Frankelli said.

In some cases, quarantining is still necessary such as when students were potentially exposed to a COVID-19 case at lunch when masks are off.

Palmerton is not offering a virtual option this year where students could log on at home and watch synchronous instruction as it was happening in the classroom. Instead, when a student has to quarantine, technology director Dan Heaney said, their teacher can place course documents and asynchronous assignments in the online Schoology platform.

“We place a high value on having students in school,” Heaney said, “and if we offered that hybrid option, we felt the teacher would spend more time managing the students at home and getting those students on the right page, and students physically in school would lose that valuable time.”

Children who have a medical or mental health condition or disability that precludes the wearing of a mask can be exempt, but very few qualify for that exemption in Palmerton.

“It is in the single digits, so less than 1% of our student population,” Frankelli said. “We’ve been fortunate. People have been pretty good about the mask requirement. We’ve only received a little push back.”

The Department of Health has not set an end date for its masking order.

“We are all in this together and together we will get through this,” Frankelli said. “This is stressful and I know that. But our goal is the same no matter what side of the fence you are on. We want to keep our kids in school.”