Northern Lehigh School District has reviewed its health and safety plan.

District Superintendent Matthew J. Link told the school board on Monday that school districts now have to do a public review of the health and safety plan every six months.

“We made some changes right before winter break, and we made some changes right after winter break,” Link said. “The most recent changes occurred on our first day back from winter break, which is Jan. 3, and those were the last revisions, and that was an internal review.”

Link added “a lot of this is kind of coming rapid fire; even most recently today I received another update from the Department of Health, which we’ll have to review administratively going further into this week.”

“When we began, we had the very stringent kind of quarantining and isolation policies,” he said. “Before winter break, we switched that to quarantining if you’re in close contact, if you were symptomatic, with some caveats to that.”

Link said guidance changed near the end of winter break.

“We kind of reviewed that, spent a lot of time administratively that Sunday communicating with each other,” he said. “I’d like to give a public acknowledgment to our school nursing team, in particular nurse Missy (Melissa) DeSocio at the high school, and nurse Tracy Hoffman at Slatington Elementary School. They gave up their time on that Sunday kind of reviewing different iterations that we went through.”

“What we have here in particular in the contact tracing isolation and quarantine section, is that it’s kind of a hybrid of what we were doing before winter break, guidance released by the CDC and the Pennsylvania Department of Health during winter break resulting in what you see here in front of you now,” he said. “Most significantly the isolation time for people who test positive is now five days.”

• For isolation of positive cases, student or employee must isolate for five days, while day zero remains the first day of symptoms or day the positive test was collected if the person is asymptomatic. The positive student or employee can return after five days if they are fever free without fever reducing medicine and other symptoms have improved.

“We strongly encourage the student or the employee to wear a mask for five consecutive days after ending isolation,” Link said.

• Student and employee close contacts must be identified and for students, their parents/guardians must be notified that their child is a close contact.

• The district must report the number of positive cases and number of close contacts to Pennsylvania Department of Education at the end of the day each Friday. The number of positive cases for students and employees will be reported on the NLSD-COVID Tracker on the district website.

• Any close contact, whether they have been vaccinated or not, if they had COVID-19 in the last 90 days or not, will only have to quarantine if they are showing symptoms.

• All household members of positive cases must quarantine whether they have symptoms or not, unless they are fully vaccinated or had COVID-19 within the last 90 days and remain symptom free. The household close-contact is encouraged to get a test on the fifth day of quarantine (rapid tests/home tests are acceptable), and if the result is positive, they should isolate for five days. Both the positive person and the close-contact are strongly encouraged to wear a mask for five consecutive days after ending isolation or quarantine.