BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) — With school breaks right around the corner, officials are joining together and asking people to stay home.

In a joint statement, health departments from the five Western New York counties – Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Niagara – are discouraging travel to areas with high COVID-19 infection rates.

This comes as many districts in the region are preparing for February Break.

Hamburg Superintendent Michael Cornell is also the president of the Erie-Niagara School Superintendents Association. He says it’s a partnership between the districts and families to keep one another informed in order to keep infection rates low.

“We respect and appreciate [the health department’s] guidance to families. And our job, we feel like, is to make sure families understand exactly how to follow the out-of-state travel regulations,” he said.

The Niagara Falls City School District doesn’t have a February Break, but will have a two-week-long Spring Break which kicks off at the end of March. Superintendent Mark Laurrie says he’s already fielding calls on what the protocol for traveling will be.

“People are going to travel,” Laurrie said. “It will be over a year that the pandemic has happened. Slowly, vaccinations are occurring. People are just going to travel, there’s no two ways about it.”

He says staff members or students who are planning to travel out of state must inform the district. Staff must fill out a form, and parents are required to let the school’s principal or nurse know.

Under state guidelines, anyone who travels out of state must either quarantine for ten days or get tested three days before arriving back in New York State. They must then be tested once again four days after they get back, and if both tests are negative, can leave quarantine.