Harper: Plans in place for adhering to state staff vaccine mandate

Weekly testing for unvaccinated staff will start this week

Jeff Helfrich
Posted 9/16/21

At the Rochelle Elementary School District 231 meeting Tuesday, Superintendent Jason Harper said plans are in place to follow Gov. JB Pritzker’s vaccine mandate for all staff members starting Monday.

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Harper: Plans in place for adhering to state staff vaccine mandate

Weekly testing for unvaccinated staff will start this week

Posted

ROCHELLE — At the Rochelle Elementary School District 231 meeting Tuesday, Superintendent Jason Harper said plans are in place to follow Gov. JB Pritzker’s vaccine mandate for all staff members starting Monday. 

The mandate requires school employees to be tested once a week if they are not two weeks out from their second COVID-19 vaccination. Harper said between the elementary district and High School District 212, about 85-90 employees are not fully-vaccinated and will have to submit to weekly testing. 50 of those are in the elementary district. 

After finding out it was unable to use rapid tests it had on hand due to the mandate, Harper said the district now plans to participate in a saliva testing program with Sauk Valley Community College that will see employees’ tests transported to Dixon to be tested and results will come later that day. 

The Rochelle school districts will be paying for the employees’ tests, as the state provides free testing for school students and staff members. Staff members have the option of getting tested on their own, but Harper said the district wanted to have in-house testing for them. 

The original announcement of the mandate came on Aug. 26 with it scheduled to take effect Sept. 5. It was pushed back when school districts and other required industries were scrambling to find testing methods. Harper said the mandate has been difficult to manage. 

“In these last several weeks we've gotten a constantly-changing message about what's acceptable and what's unacceptable,” Harper said. “So, our frustration lies with giving a mandate to schools without really any input from the schools and really very few ways in which the school can comply with that mandate."

Harper said so far, teacher’s associations, non-certified staff members, transportation department members and others that the mandate applies to have been “great to work with.” At this point, he said the districts have seen “zero staffing loss” due to the mandate. 

“They might not 100 percent agree with this latest vaccination and weekly testing mandate, but they understand it's beyond our community's control and at the end of the day, they're so passionate about being with our students and helping them out that they've been willing to work with us on the mandate,” Harper said. 

Enrollment

Harper gave an update to the board regarding enrollment numbers in the elementary district. From kindergarten through eighth grade, total students currently stand at 1,367, an average per grade of 151.89. The district had 51 more students at this time last year. 

“We do have a drop,” Harper said. “We had 171 eighth graders graduate. We have 153 students coming into kindergarten. That's part of the change there. And then of course we had some attrition. Some classes have gone up and some have gone down. The aggregate across K-8 is a drop of 51 students. We'll continue to check the numbers and they're constantly changing."

Substitute rates

The board voted unanimously to increase the pay rate for substitute teachers from $85 per day to $105 per day. 

Harper said the reasoning for the change involved the approaching minimum wage rise to $15 per hour along with widespread recent challenges of finding employees in more than just the education industry. 

The school district had done a regional study and found that $105 a day is on the lower end in districts east of Rochelle and pay per day ranges from $95-105 in Ogle County. Harper said the pay change puts Rochelle in a competitive place and honors the work subs are doing. 

“I think it makes sense,” Board President Dave Casey said. “We have to compete with everybody else.”

Buses

The board unanimously approved a resolution to go out to bid to lease seven 77-passenger buses and purchase one mini bus in the future. Transportation Director Sherri Smith told Harper the districts need to replace several buses. Bid recommendations will be brought to the board for review and approval.