As the school year moves closer, the Chautauqua County Health Department has been working closely with districts, helping them get ready for the fall, although some question remain unanswered.

“We’ve been doing a tremendous amount of work trying to preparing for reopening,” Christine Schuyler, county public health director and commissioner of Social Services, told members of the Chautauqua County Board of Health.

Schuyler expressed some concern about unanswered questions. “We do have some guidance from the state health department. Unfortunately there are a lot of gaps in that guidance and a lot of questions and concerns are still out there,” she said.

On Thursday, Schuyler said sometime next week the state plans to have all school questions answered. “We’ll be really down under the wire to get clarifying clinical guidance. That’s really what we are waiting for,” she said.

Schuyler said one of the issues the state is expected to clarify is when a student who is ill can return to class. “Right now the state health department guidance says that children need to have a negative test result to return to school if they were out. The clarifying guidance is supposed to negate that and go to a symptom based return,” she said, meaning no symptoms for a certain number of days.

Schuyler said there’s no overall testing policy if a student is positive for having the coronavirus. “There is no way for us to put anything out there that says in stone ‘if a child tests positive, these people are going to be tested and these people aren’t,’ or ‘this is what’s going to happen and that’s going to happen.’ It’s really going to be a case-by-case basis,” she said.

The county health department sent a chart to schools to show when students can return to school and when they can’t. In the chart, a student who tests positive for COVID-19 or has at least one symptom must stay home for 10 days after having no fever or other symptoms for 24 hours. The same is true for students who test positive but show no symptoms. Meanwhile a student who has been exposed to a person with COVID-19 must remain home for 14 days.

Board members admitted that if a student tests positive, there is no way the county can test a large number of students in a particular school, and even if they did, the results wouldn’t be back in time to be effective.

If a student does test positive, Schuyler said the county health department will let the child’s parent know as well as those whom the child had close contact with or their parents. “We will not be making any sort of notifications broadly to any other parents, staff members or anyone else,” she said.

Each school had to create a plan for notifications when a student tests positive and that’s what the schools will follow for communication purposes. “We as the local health department will not be making any wide-spread notification, just as we have done all along,” she said.