At the Jan. 24 board meeting, the faculty discussed how D99 has seen an increase of cases since the week of Dec. 6, and reached an all-time high the week of Jan. 3. As a result, the school has had to implement new changes to aid in the safety of the school.

Superintendent Hank Thiele talked about the challenges the school district had faced when cases began increasing in early December.

“The number of staff out or testing positive their impact on the school, staffing the school changed drastically when we went from 10 days to five days,” Thiele said.

The changes were in accordance with the CDC updates to its own guidelines on Dec. 27. Quarantine length shortened from 10 days to five days, if you have received both doses of the vaccine. Another change in the D99 policy was that faculty would also have to receive the COVID-19 booster shot.

“One of the changes is probably not in our favor in the fact that staff need to now have received both vaccines and the booster to be exempt from being a close contact. We have shared this information with the staff,” Thiele said.

Changes in policy were also extended to close contact exemptions. A close contact is anyone who has interacted with someone infected with COVID-19 for more than 15 minutes. These policy changes have resulted in the numbers returning to normalcy according to Thiele.

“You can definitely see we remained pretty low through november and then started to climb after thanksgiving, and then climbed greatly returning from break. And now we are kind on our way back down again,” Thiele said.