Southwestern Central School Superintendent Maureen Donahue, right, shared several updates with the district's board of education regarding the reopening of schools during Tuesday's board of education meeting. P-J Photo By Cameron Hurst

Discussions are already beginning locally and at the state level with regard to the reopening of school districts in the fall amid the outbreak of COVID-19.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that school districts will be given finalized guidance from the state board of regents after their July 13 meeting. Schools will then have until July 31 to submit their plan to the state and a decision on schools reopening will be made the week of Aug. 1-7.

During Tuesday’s board of education meeting, Southwestern Central School Superintendent Maureen Donahue shared several updates regarding the plans the district is putting into place for next school year.

“Internally, we’ve been looking at what has gone well with remote in case we’re back with remote at some point.” she said. “Hopefully, we’re never back to remote, but if we are we will look at what we can improve on and what we did well. We’ve been working on a couple of those things internally.”

Donahue also said that architects have drawn up CAD drawings for every single room in the district to see how many six-foot circles fit in a room in anticipation of having to socially distance students in the classroom.

“It gives us an idea to start to plan and take a look at what our floor plans look like,” she said, noting that the district has also looked into purchasing the necessary air quality filter that would adhere to minimum efficiency reporting values — also known as MERV — and has looked into getting their purchase funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“MERV ratings are the new things that will be required of air quality,” Donahue said. “We’re actually having conversations about how to implement these things. I don’t want to throw money at something that we’ll only be able to use for six months and be done with it and instead we want to look at things that we can use for long-term overall health. There is an overall filter than can go on all over our big units, then there are smaller units within the building that we would retrofit a different type of a filter, then there’s an actual air quality filter that would go in a classroom.”

The district is also looking into the use of infrared cameras and thermometers.

“But if we install those it would mean every kid would have to come through the door individually,” she said. “It would take us two hours to get the kids into the building in the morning.”

Also, unlike doctors’ offices and grocery stores, the school district is unable to use Plexiglas in buildings because they go against fire code and has already looked into the use of LEXAN, which is fire-rated for school buildings.

“You have to look at LEXAN and we’re looking at a global supplier out of Pennsylvania for our offices and some of the other places where there will be contact with people so we can minimize it with our staff,” she said.

Donahue also emphasized district athletic facilities cannot be opened even though youth sports were allowed to resume on Monday.

“Please understand that youth activities do not mean our activities,” she said. “Schools are still in Phase Four. We have to follow the guidelines of Phase Four. Today, the phone was ringing, ‘Can you open up the turf? Can you get the tennis courts opened up? Can I come over and play soccer?’ We cannot open up our facilities until we have the ‘OK’ and then we have to have a plan in place as to how we are going to monitor, how we are going to control to make things safe.”

Donahue, who was also recently elected President of the Section VI Athletic Council, also shared information about developments in interscholastic athletic play.

“There are three different scenarios,” she said. “We’re looking at all the scenarios, shortened seasons, more-involved sports moving to spring. There are a number of different things. Section VI has a task force that I will be sitting on and we’ll meet this week. I predict in the next couple weeks this will all start moving very quickly. The state athletic meeting included governor’s office, state health department and state education department that all participated in that… We’ve got to start getting back to some kind of normal with provisions to protect everyone.”

She added, “I remind everybody that this is real. We have to be vigilant, we need to make sure we’re doing our part to mitigate this. If we don’t mitigate, we’re going to be back to where we were in March and I don’t want to go back there. I don’t think any of us want to be back there.”