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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 24, 2020)
WEEKEND EDITION Fall 2020 INSIDE REGIONAL PLAY GAINING UMATILLA COUNTY ADOPTS STEAM ACROSS THE STATE UPDATED PUBLIC TRANSIT PLAN SPORTS, B1 Workers process potatoes as they are loaded into a storage facility at Threemile Canyon Farms near Boar- man on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020. REGION, A3 Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian OCTOBER 24-25, 2020 145th Year, No. 4 CDA board walks back land vote By JADE MCDOWELL East Oregonian BOARDMAN — The Colum- bia Development Authority board has reversed a previous vote the board took stating its intent to deed industrial land on the for- mer Umatilla Chemical Depot over to the Port of Morrow and Port of Umatilla. The change was a welcome one to the Umatilla County Board of Commissioners, which had opposed the original decision. County board chair John Shafer said he appreciated the CDA’s will- ingness to spend more time consid- ering the issue. “I think this was the right deci- sion,” he said. During a Thursday, Oct. 22, meeting, the CDA board voted unanimously to rescind the See CDA, Page A9 EOC3 discusses climate change Forest management is one of the tools for combatting climate change to be discussed By ALEX CASTLE East Oregonian PENDLETON — In May, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmo- spheric Administration reported that carbon dioxide levels were recorded at an average of over 417 parts per million. Those lev- els indicate that there’s more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at any other point in human his- tory, and may be the highest they’ve been in three million years. During the Eastern Oregon Cli- mate Change Coalition’s monthly virtual meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 20, Richie Gardner of the Umatilla National Forest gave a presentation of how these historic levels connect See EOC3, Page A9 $1.50 WINNER OF THE 2020 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD COVID-19 IN SCHOOLS Striking a balance School districts in Umatilla, Morrow counties try to persist through COVID-19 outbreaks By ALEX CASTLE, JADE MCDOWELL AND ANTONIO SIERRA East Oregonian M ORROW COUNTY — Local school districts are beginning to open their doors to students during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the virus continues to complicate the picture. As many schools in the region bring in small groups of students in a limited capacity, the Oregon Health Author- ity is reporting six recent cases of COVID-19 that includes staff and students from schools in Irrigon and Heppner. Pendleton has one staff case at Sherwood Heights Elementary School, on top of one the district reported before start- ing its limited in-person programming. Pendleton Superintendent Chris Fritsch said Sherwood Heights is returning to a dis- tance learning-only model for now, but the rest of the district’s schools will continue unabated. In the Morrow County School District’s case, these cases aren’t preventing it from try- ing to take the next step forward. Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian, File Ukiah High School students discuss a community engagement project during class on Sept. 3, 2020. The southern Umatilla County school was among the fi rst in the state to reopen for in-per- son education at all grade levels. COVID-19 UPDATE The Oregon Health Authority reported 550 new cases of C OVID-19 acros s the state on Fri- day, Oct. 23, the single-highest daily case total reported since the pandemic began. From Oct. 17 to Oct. 23, a total of 96 new cases of the virus were reported in Umatilla County. The Umatilla County Public Health Department reported that six residents with the ‘When can we get back together?’ Morrow County School District has been offering limited in-person instruction to qual- ifying students in all of its schools, but on Wednesday, Oct. 21, the district sent out a let- ter to parents stating that all students may soon have an opportunity for in-person instruction. “On Tuesday, Oct. 20, we were able to meet with Morrow County Public Health to review COVID-19 numbers and present a plan for reopening. From that meeting it was agreed that if we could keep our number of ‘new cases’ to nine or less this week (October 18–24), we will be able to reopen schools on Wednesday, Oct. 28,” the letter stated. At fi rst glance, the announcement seemed to fl y in the face of the Oregon Department of Education’s rules. According to the state education depart- ment, for a school to reopen to all students at all grade levels, the county where the school district is located must have no more than 10 confi rmed COVID-19 cases per 100,000 resi- dents in a week for three weeks in a row, and less than 5% of tests in the county must come back positive for three weeks. According to the state’s weekly reporting on the topic, Morrow County had eight cases the week of Oct. 11, working out to 63.1 cases per 100,000, with a test positivity rate above 12%. But after the state fi rst announced those general guidelines for bringing students back, it has continued to release less strict metrics granting exceptions for certain situations. In Morrow County’s case, Superintendent Dirk Dirksen pointed to a set of metrics allowing for a “hybrid return” for all students in coun- ties that have fewer than 30,000 people and an average population density of less than six people per square mile. For counties that fi t that defi nition, districts can bring back any students for some in-person learning, as long as they have had 30 or fewer total cases in the past three weeks, with less than half of those cases in the fi nal week of the period. The local health department must also determine that the county is not experiencing “community spread,” meaning contact tracers can’t determine where patients were exposed to the virus. Dirksen said Morrow County Health Department has indicated that if the county has fewer than 10 cases for the week of Oct. 18, they will fi t that defi nition. If that happens, Dirksen said, they want to jump on the chance to reopen immediately in case the next week brings a higher number of cases and closes that window. “We can’t pass up this opportunity,” he said. Dirksen said schools will have different schedules under the hybrid model, but in gen- eral, elementary school students will have in-person learning in the morning with stu- dents choosing to stay online watching the instruction over video, while the afternoon will involve teachers working with all students online in small groups or individually. Secondary school students choosing to return to the classroom will stay in a single home room all day, with that teacher acting as a tutor as they interact with other teachers over video. “With COVID, we don’t want those kids moving around (the building),” Dirksen said. “It’s a lot easier to track for the local health department.” The district had already been bringing in students who were in special education, have social-emotional needs or trouble accessing the internet for two hours a day under the “lim- ited in-person instruction model” allowed for special groups of students. Previously, Dirksen had said it had been going well, and feedback from families was positive. “What I’m usually getting is, ‘When can we do more? When can we get back together?’” he said. Handling outbreaks Umatilla County Public Health Director Joe Fiumara said Monday, Oct. 19, that the few local outbreaks associated with schools have primarily been isolated cases of the virus and offer at least anecdotal optimism about the effi - cacy of the current protections in place. “For the couple that have had the possibil- ity of school exposures, while we are seeing some cases associated, we’re not seeing large COVID-19 NUMBERS virus were hospitalized at the end of the week. On Oct. 19, a 53-year-old man from Umatilla County died after testing positive for the virus on Sept. 27. He had been hospitalized at Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center in Tualatin, the Or- egon Healt h Authority stated in a press release, and the presence of preexisting health condi- tions was still being confi rmed as of Oct. 22. spread,” he said. “That indicates the protec- tions that are in place seem to be in the right direction and seem to be working when they are doing in-person activities.” In addition to, ideally, limiting the poten- tial for the virus to spread in the fi rst place, the protections school districts are employing can expedite the case investigation process for the health department. While other positive cases of the virus are commonly traced through direct conversations by an employee of the health department with the COVID-positive individual, when a stu- dent tests positive, school administrators are able to provide the health department with detailed information about any potential expo- sures to the virus that may have occurred. “The school has a blueprint, they have a plan, they have logs, they have cohorts desig- nated,” Fiumara said. “That’s all information we can then use to supplement the investiga- tion. It can help us narrow down exposure peri- ods and what some of the risk of exposure at the site might have been.” Positive cases at schools are eventually funneled to OHA, which is tallying cases of students and staff at schools where in-per- son activities have resumed, with the asterisk that not all cases may have come from those activities. While counties need to meet a set of statisti- cal thresholds that prove the spread of COVID- 19 is limited before the state will allow schools to fully reopen, how schools respond to out- breaks is largely left at the discretion of local public health departments. But an amenable public health department hasn’t assuaged every educator’s concerns. Contrasting approaches Umatilla Superintendent Heidi Sipe sits on the state’s Healthy Schools Reopening Coun- cil that helps determine the rules that govern what school districts can and cannot do during the pandemic. Sipe said the Oregon Legisla- See Schools, Page A9 WEEK ENDING TOTALS FOR 10/22/20 IN UMATILLA COUNTY RISK LEVEL TOTAL HIGH CASE COUNT 84 TOTAL CASE GOAL 8 OR POSITIVE LESS TEST RATE 13.2 % POSITIVE 0.5 TEST GOAL % 5 %
