Colfax school board approves renewing wrestling cooperative with Bloomer
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By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — The Colfax Board of Education has approved renewing the wrestling cooperative with Bloomer for another two years.
Every two years, Colfax and Bloomer have to apply to the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) to continue the wrestling cooperative, said William C. Yingst Jr., district administrator, at the Colfax Board of Education’s January 17 meeting.
The wrestling cooperative has been a successful program. Cooperatives give students the opportunity to compete when there are not enough students at one school to run a program, he said.
Bloomer and Colfax have had a wrestling cooperative for 12 or 13 years, Yingst noted.
“It has been positive for Colfax. Bloomer is a good partner,” he said.
John Dachel, principal at Colfax High School, agreed.
“It is has been going well,” he said.
The Colfax wrestling coach, Dave Blanchard, has an excellent background in wrestling, competed at the collegiate level, and was All American at Arizona State, Yingst said.
The Colfax Board of Education unanimously approved the application for cooperative team renewal for wrestling with the Bloomer school district.
COVID
With the current spike in COVID-19 cases fueled by the Omicron variant, various medical doctors in recent Zoom meetings have said the spike will continue for another two to four to eight weeks, Yingst said.
“We will have to ride it out and get through,” he said, adding, “It’s very contagious and is causing a lot of illness.”
In addition to COVID-19, influenza and severe colds are circulating as well, Yingst said.
“The indoor season in the winter is conducive to more illness,” he said.
Polly Rudi, pupil services director, reported that there were 13 new student cases of COVID-19 in the school district that day.
All together, there were 27 active cases of the disease in the school district on the day of the school board meeting, and 103 were out on quarantine, she said.
Thirteen to 16 percent of the student population has been out with illness, and a number of staff members have been out ill, Rudi said, noting that 14 percent of the students were out sick the day of the board meeting.
The school is “stretched thin” on substitutes, including substitutes for teachers, teacher’s aides and bus drivers, Yingst said.
“We’re hanging on by a thread … we’re trying to keep school open,” he said.
Jodi Kiekhafer, school board member, asked how long students and staff were required to stay out on quarantine.
The school district is following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines of five days, but quarantine is very complicated, and the school nurse has been handling the quarantines, Yingst said.
Explaining every step of quarantine is difficult because it is dependent on vaccinated or unvaccinated and where an individual might be in the disease process, he said, adding that “you need a spreadsheet” to understand the quarantine protocols.
“I would still like to see masks (in school). I wear one all day long,” Kiekhafer said, acknowledging that she was not wearing a mask at the moment.
The Colfax Board of Education did not take any action to change the school district’s back-to-school plan.
COVID testing
The Colfax school district now has on-site testing for COVID-19, and several people were tested the first day it was available on the Thursday before the school board meeting, Yingst said.
Testing will be available each week on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and will alternate with Boyceville, he said.
While the PCR tests are available now, no rapid antigen tests are available yet, Yingst noted.
The antigen tests will be useful for testing athletic teams and being able to keep the athletic teams eligible to play, he said.
COVID-19 has had an impact on both the girls’ and boys’ basketball teams, and several games have had to be postponed and rescheduled, Yingst said.
Menards did have some of the antigen rapid home test kits available for order online, and Yingst said he was able to order 100 of them.
Several days later, when the Colfax Messenger checked the Menards website, the antigen tests were sold out.
Other business
In other business, the Colfax Board of Education:
• Learned that Winter Carnival week at Colfax High School will be February 7 to February 11 and that the king and queen would be crowned at the end of the day on Friday of that week.
• Learned that the FFA Farm Toy Show is scheduled for Sunday, February 27.
• Learned that parent-teacher conferences at the high school and middle school will be virtual and will start on Monday, February 15, and will run through Thursday, February 18.
• Learned that Colfax Elementary students have now passed 12,435 Accelerated Reader quizzes and have earned 10,167.8 points. The average percent correct is 89 percent. Students have a read a total of more than 39 million words. Five students have read more than a million words, and one student has read more than two million words.
• Learned that the state mandated ACT test date is March 8, with a make-up date of March 22, and an emergency test date of April 12. Parents and juniors should anticipate that all juniors will be tested on March 8.
• Learned that ballot placement for candidates in the April 5 election will be Todd A. Kragness, Andrew J. De Moe, Matt Flatland and Tom Hendrickson. According to state statute, the school district clerk supervises the drawing of lots for ballot placement. De Moe, the school district clerk, appointed Ashley Goulet, administrative assistant, to complete the drawing of lots on January 7. The drawing of lots was witnessed by school district employees Jan Fehr and Peggy Larson.
• Approved 2022 summer school programs in swimming and regular classroom instruction in all areas, including music, agriculture and Summer Saunters, contingent upon pandemic conditions and safety. The Elk Mound school district, as part of the district’s referendum projects, is doing some remodeling work on the swimming pool area, Yingst said. Colfax schedules summer school swimming lessons for two weeks at the Elk Mound High School swimming pool. The dates this year will be June 6 to June 17, and administrators in Elk Mound believe those dates will work, he said.
• Approved and designated spaces for open enrollment for regular education and for special education. Junior kindergarten has 12 seats available. Kindergarten has 19 seats available. First and second grade both have 36 seats available. Third grade has 32 seats. Fourth grade has 28 seats. Fifth and sixth grade both have 33 seats. Seventh grade has 28 seats. Eighth grade has 20 seats. Ninth grade has 33 seats. Tenth grade has nine seats. Eleventh grade has 20 seats. Twelfth grade has 30 seats. Special education at all levels has zero seats available. Open enrollment will begin on February 7 and will continue through 4 p.m. April 29. Applications for open enrollment can be found at HYPERLINK “http://www.dpi.wi.gov/open-enrollment/applications”www.dpi.wi.gov/open-enrollment/applications.