Vaccine clinics, masks and quarantines: What to know as Beaufort Co. school begins
Students can add one more item to their back-to-school checklist: A first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Beaufort County School District and Beaufort Memorial Hospital are holding two COVID vaccine clinics this week for anyone 12 and older. Minors must be accompanied by a parent or guardian to participate, and attendees must sign up in advance.
Thursday’s clinic will be held at Bluffton Middle School from 3-6 p.m. Participants can register at www.BeaufortMemorial.org/aug12vax.
Friday’s clinic will be held at Lady’s Island Middle School from 3-6 p.m. Participants can register at www.BeaufortMemorial.org/aug13vax.
Beaufort County has seen a spike in coronavirus cases in the last few weeks, along with at least two quarantines at different district high schools. The Battery Creek High School football team’s quarantine won’t end until Friday, just three days before the start of the school year.
Here’s what else you need to know as students return to school:
Shortened quarantines
The district is following the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control’s interim guidance for schools when establishing quarantines.
Those who are deemed “close contacts” under DHEC rules — meaning they have been within three feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes — are asked to quarantine for 10 days.
Close contacts who are fully vaccinated, and those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 90 days, are exempt from quarantines unless they become symptomatic.
DHEC recommends that fully vaccinated people get tested for COVID-19 three to five days after exposure and wear a mask at school until they get a negative COVID test result or 14 days after exposure.
No mask mandates or virtual classes
Two of the biggest changes for this school year are partially due to the South Carolina legislature.
Beaufort County School District will not mandate mask-wearing following a state budget proviso that says any school or district that requires masks for students or staff will lose state funding.
There’s also a state budget proviso blocking extensive virtual options — school districts can’t have more than 5% of their students in a virtual program this school year. If they go over that limit, districts could lose up to 50% of their per-pupil funding, according to the S.C. Department of Education.
The district will not offer remote-only options this year for elementary and high schoolers, and it only has 100 slots in a full-time virtual program for middle schoolers through the Lowcountry Education Consortium. About 80 of those slots were filled, according to district instructional chief Mary Stratos.
The district is keeping many of last year’s COVID precautions in place, including contact tracing, maintaining three feet of social distance and providing Plexiglass barriers for students upon request.
South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control still recommends universal mask-wearing and vaccination to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
But with the spread of the Delta variant, which has been linked to several spikes in pediatric COVID-19 cases around the country, most pediatricians are predicting a case spike “two to four weeks after school starts,” Dr. Faith Polkey told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette earlier this week.
Polkey, the chief clinical officer of Beaufort Jasper Hampton Comprehensive Health Services, said “that’s what makes sense.”
“If you have a significant portion of people unvaccinated ... the virus is going to go where it can in the susceptible population.”