The Cheyenne Mountain School District 12 announced via letter on Aug. 18 that all students, faculty, staff, and visitors will need to mask up while inside any district facility, including schools.
That requirement will go into effect on Thursday, Aug. 19, and will apply to everyone, regardless of their vaccination status, in any indoor district setting. Per a federal mandate, the district said, people will also need to mask up on school buses.
That policy goes into effect the same day all students up to and including the sixth grade, Cheyenne Mountain Junior High seventh graders, and Cheyenne Mountain High School juniors and seniors begin their orientations for the new school year.
The decision to require masks, district officials said, was made as they monitored continuing and emerging requirements, recommendations, and data from local, state, and federal public health officials.
“This decision has not been made lightly or in isolation,” superintendent David J. Peak said in a letter to the district.
In addition to the mask requirement, the district will continue to implement other pandemic mitigation protocols, like providing masks and handing out surface sanitizers for daily use in classrooms, limiting visits from outside the school with an authorization process, continuing to implement virtual meetings, and encouraging daily self-screening for faculty, staff, students, and their families.
POLL: SHOULD SCHOOL DISTRICTS IN COLORADO INSTITUTE MASK MANDATES?
Should all school districts in Colorado institute mask mandates for students and staff as the 2021-22 school year begins? On Wednesday, Gov. Polis wrote school superintendents ‘to implore’ they institute masking and health measures.
The district added that state and local public health officials recommend vaccinations for people 12 and up, and that those attending school-sanctioned athletic and extracurricular activities in different counties or jurisdictions will need to abide by the pandemic mitigation protocols of that area.
“The district will continue to partner with and assess the information from these medical professionals and public health officials to determine the continued layers of intervention to best support the health and safety of all of our students and staff,” Peak said, adding that further updates to their back-to-school guide would be released as they were needed.
Click or tap here for the Cheyenne Mountain guide to the 2021-22 school year.
This content was originally published here.
