TEXARKANA, Ark. - The School Board here approved the administration's recommendation to continue requiring face coverings for students, faculty, staff and visitors while indoors on campus.
This effort by the district is meant to follow guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
TASD will reevaluate their mask guidelines monthly, but Superintendent Dr. Becky Kesler said it's the right move to keep students and staff members safe.
"At this point, it is still our recommendation that we continue wearing the masks for at least another month because we do think we're going to see a downward trend with the positive cases," Kesler said. "It's just so frightening when we see the student numbers this high because these are anywhere from kindergarten to high school students we're talking about, and the Delta variant is hitting that age so hard.
"We realize wearing a mask is not popular, and no one prefers wearing masks. But we would definitely prefer keeping our students and staff healthy."
TASD is at a total of 106 positive student COVID cases and 17 from staff members for the year, as of Tuesday. This is a hefty increase in student cases at this point in the school year, compared to this point in the last school year.
Kesler said quarantine numbers are lower this year, however, and the majority of quarantines have been caused by sources of infection from outside of school.
In other news from the meeting, the board approved an increase to adult meal prices. There will be an increase of 35 cents in adult lunch pricing and 25 cents in adult breakfast pricing, bringing the totals to $4 and $2.75, respectively.
The board also approved the purchase of the Kids Discover Science Magazines in the amount of $97,131, with funding coming from Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund and Title 4 funds. Kids Discover Science Magazines provides digital and print magazines for K-5 students in the classroom and their home library.
The district's 2021-2022 annual financial budget was adopted during the meeting.
The total operating budget for 2021-2022 is $34,941,384. Last year, the total operating budget was $33,327,666. The actual spending for last year was $34,299,545.