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Bartlesville Superintendent Chuck McCauley appeared on Community Connection on Wednesday morning to give an update on the Bartlesville Public Schools District and their continued response to COVID-19.

Bartlesville Public Schools has gone through five weeks of in-person instruction while others are still trying to get started. For that reason, Superintendent McCauley said he is super appreciative of the community's support and the resources you have helped them provide.

Whether your support came in the form of donating personal protective equipment, providing hotspots for internet connectivity, or voting on past Bond Issues so BPS can have the technology in place to provide virtual instruction, Superintendent McCauley thanks you. He said he is glad to live in a place like Bartlesville.

From Superintendent McCauley's perspective, a true community effort was needed to pull off the in-person and virtual instruction this year. Superintendent McCauley also thanked the District's staff for their hard work and effort to get our kids back in school. He said he loves seeing the doors open at each of Bartlesville's school sites and kids being welcomed into the building with safety precautions in place.

Bartlesville High School did have its doors closed for a day early on in the school year. Superintendent McCauley said the District did additional cleaning and contact tracing that day because they did have a coronavirus case on campus. He said he believes they are getting better on the fronts of cleaning on contact tracing as more and more kids are returning to school for in-person learning, especially at Bartlesville's elementary schools.

Since the beginning of the school year in Bartlesville, the District has seen Washington County teeter back and forth between being in the yellow or "low-risk" category for COVID-19 cases to the orange or "moderate-risk" category for the virus on the Oklahoma State Department of Health's COVID-19 Alert Map. However, Superintendent McCauley said Bartlesville Public Schools will continue to track the District's student and staff coronavirus cases and isolations. He said the District has .1-percent of their students and staff listed as active cases while .7-percent of their students and staff are in quarantine, so although Washington County is in the orange category on the OSDH's COVID-19 Alert Map currently, it does not make sense for the District to shift to distance learning for all students and staff.

Superintendent McCauley said the data shows that Bartlesville can still be in school. He said the District still needs to be vigilant and in a mode that will allow them to remain in school.

Bartlesville Public Schools does continue to monitor the coronavirus cases that come up in Washington County. Superintendent McCauley said they continue to monitor all of the data that comes out. He said the most important thing that keeps the District in school is the impact the data has on their school system.

This is determined by how many staff and students cannot participate in in-person instruction. He said a serious lack in staffing would be a big contributing factor that would cause BPS to move to virtual instruction. Superintendent McCauley said that has not been the case so far. He said they will continue to do their best to keep each school site open for our kids.

Below is the full Community Connection with Bartlesville Superintendent McCauley.