By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Reno County Health Department and the county's school district superintendents will be releasing their version of the gating criteria for the county's schools later this week.
"We're meeting Wednesday at 3 p.m.," said Buhler USD 313 Superintendent Cindy Couchman. "We hope to have the community gating criteria available soon after that. There will be some differences between the response between districts. but the county guidelines or criteria are what we're going to be using for each zone of green, yellow, orange and red will all be the same. There will be a little bit of difference between how each school approaches each color zone."
The color zones will be familiar to those who have seen the Kansas State Department of Education's gating criteria document.
"There will be an activity line, a learning line, like at what point do you take them all to remote," Couchman said. "There will be maybe a spectators guideline, there might be. On the site, if you look at the KSDE's categories, those will follow sort of the same layout."
The gating criteria will be looked at on a weekly basis on Fridays, looking ahead to the next week.
"The reason we're looking at Fridays is because of the data dump on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and then also the Reno County Health Department recovering active cases and how long it takes to take them off of the data," Couchman said. "We're trying to do the best we can to use the most valid and reliable data that we have."
A press release will be issued once the data is finalized.