Tulsa School Superintendent Deborah Gist and TPS Chief Financial and Operations Officer Jorge Robles are proposing a lifting of some of the requirements of dealing with the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

On Nov. 29, the district will no require masks indoors at district office sites or these high school campuses: Booker T. Washington, East Central, Nathan Hale, McLain and Memorial.

Students at an elementary, middle or junior high school or one of four combined middle and high school campuses will still have to wear masks on campus through January 4.

Due to a federal mask mandate for public transportation, Tulsa Public Schools will still require students and staff to wear masks on buses.

Beginning on Nov. 29, TPS will allow parents to volunteer inside school buildings if they are not sick. Students, teachers and staff who test position for the coronarvirus will be told to stay home. After the Thanksgiving break, teachers, students and staff who have been exposed to the virus won’t be required to quarantine unless they have symptoms.

Also, the TPS Board looked at changes to grade movements at the elementary and junior high campuses in the Hale and East Central feeder patterns plus two alternative sites.

Beginning in the fall of 2022, the 16 elementary schools across those feeder patterns would go through fifth grade rather than sixth grade. The sixth graders will go to East Central and Nathan Hale junior high schools, which would become middle schools.

Elementary schools to be affected by the proposal are Bell, Cooper, Disney, Dolores Huerta, Hamilton, Hoover, Kendall-Whittier, Kerr, Lewis and Clark, Lindbergh, MacArthur, Mitchell, McKinley, Owen, Peary and Skelly. A change is also proposed for Project Accept TRAICE Elementary School and Tulsa MET Junior High School.

If approved by the board in December, all of the district’s elementary schools would go through fifth grade.