Education Week - September 16, 2020 - 10

Districts Struggle to Keep Tabs
On COVID-19 Cases in Schools,
Communities
By Sarah D. Sparks
More than 70,000 new cases of
COVID-19 were identified among
U.S. children in the last week of August and first week of September, as
schools began to reopen. But there
was no systematic way for education
leaders to know whether sick children
or their ill adult peers ended up on
campus-or for district leaders to get
a handle on when to close schools to
curb an outbreak.
The federal government does
not publicly track school-related
COVID-19 cases. While the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
did track coronavirus-related school
closures last spring, it has not continued to track school closures or moves
to full-remote learning related to outbreaks this fall.
Nationwide, fewer than half of
states collect and provide (or are preparing to provide) any public data
on COVID-19 infections related to
schools. Some states such as New
York and Michigan have announced
they would launch data dashboards
this month.
And of the states that do have dashboards, not all provide the same level
of detail. Mississippi's dashboard,
for example, includes both the total
new and cumulative cases among
students and staff at each school,
while Tennessee's notes, in addition
to the number of COVID-19 cases at
a school, whether the school uses an
in-person or hybrid learning model,
which could create a higher risk for
spreading infection.

related coronavirus data, meaning
districts must rely on parent reports
or direct relays from local health departments to identify a student or
staff member who is absent due to
COVID-19. In order to change over
to remote learning, a district must
have at least a 10 percent COVID-19
infection among students and staff,
as well as an infection rate of at least
15 percent in the county. And students
who are quarantined at home because of coronavirus exposure would
not count toward that absenteeism
threshold, making it incredibly difficult for district administrators to
properly calculate infection rates
when requesting a move to remoteonly learning.

In a lot of our rural
districts where
cases are spiking,
the health
department gets
overwhelmed and
they don't have
time to keep the
district informed.

Where's the Data?

SARA ANNE WILLETTE

Even when the data are public,
they can be difficult for educators,
administrators, and parents to find.
For example, Michigan plans to
begin posting data to a dashboard on
its health department site later this
month, while Tennessee's education
department posts its own coronavirus
dashboard. In Texas, schools submit
weekly reports on the number of people in their buildings who have tested
positive for the virus to the Texas
Education Agency, but send separate,
more detailed forms to local health
departments for contact tracing.
Critics in several states, including
Florida, Iowa, Michigan, and Texas,
have voiced concern that states are
providing too little guidance for districts, and delays and reporting issues
have made it more difficult to identify
potential outbreaks in time to get
ahead of them.
In Iowa, a largely rural state which
has seen one of the largest recent
spikes in coronavirus rates, confusion over how to track and report outbreaks has caused widespread problems for districts trying to respond.
The state does not release school-

Independent COVID-19
case tracker

"Districts are having to do all the
work themselves," said Sara Anne
Willette, a data analyst who has run
an independent Iowa COVID-19
case tracker since March. "Some districts are in counties with great public health departments, some are in
counties where they hear about cases
from parents and never hear about
them from the [health department.]
In a lot of our rural districts where
cases are spiking, the health department gets overwhelmed and they
don't have time to keep the district
informed. ... When it comes to rural
districts, it's been a very steep learning curve."

Stopgap Groups Step Up
In the absence of solid data, independent groups and local partnerships are filling in as stopgaps for

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 16, 2020 | www.edweek.org

many districts. For example, the
National Education Association
launched a nationwide tracker of
reports of school-related COVID-19
outbreaks, based on a spreadsheet
that Kansas teacher Alisha Morris built from Google searches and
news reports. Now, the tracker allows users to report cases from their
own schools or districts and search
for confirmed and suspected cases
by state. Similarly, the COVID Monitor, an online tracker developed by a
former health official in Florida, aggregates data from news reports and
local health data.
Willette, a data analyst who also
has an autoimmune disorder, has
been working with schools, health
offices, and the public to maintain an
associated school coronavirus map
for her Iowa COVID-19 tracker. Willette's tracker includes not just data
on overall cases, but also the numbers
of staff and students quarantined
and recovered and the grade spans
affected where possible. Research to
date has suggested elementary-age
students may be less likely to contract
and spread the coronavirus than high
school students and adults.
Yet at a time when hundreds of students may be quarantined in a single
outbreak, individual and crowdsourced trackers can't help every
district. To keep ahead of outbreaks,
education leaders need more local
partnerships.

Potential Elements for a
District COVID-19 Dashboard
* Student absences from COVID-19: A daily or weekly update
(as often as is feasible) of the number of positive test results.
Some districts use totals, while others use school-by-school
or grade-span totals.
* Staff absences from COVID-19: The same data as student
totals, but for staff. It can be helpful to separate out staff
from student infections as some studies have suggested
school-based outbreaks are more likely to begin among staff
or other adults on campus.
* Cumulative totals or 7- or 14-day rolling averages of
COVID-19 absences: These data can help identify trends
over time, which can be particularly important in comparing
district infections to community spread rates when trying
to make a decision about whether to move to remote
instruction.
* Staff/student absences from quarantine: This data takes
into account those who have been identiﬁed based on
symptoms or through contact with an infected person,
but who have not received a positive coronavirus test
themselves.
* Staff/student absences from other illnesses: A few districts
are also collecting data on absences from other illnesses,
since symptoms from the coming ﬂu and allergy seasons
will likely mimic coronavirus in many ways. Understanding
trends in these illnesses can help administrators understand
whether their schools are experiencing a COVID-19 outbreak
or something less severe.

SOURCE: Education Week reporting

Local Partnerships
In a bad winter, North Shore School
District 112 in Illinois is used to making day-to-day decisions on snow
days. Now, Superintendent Michael
Lubelfeld tracks a different daily forecast, from the Lake County Health
Department.
The week after Labor Day, as
students settled into a new school
year of hybrid remote and in-person
learning, the clouds were already
gathering as Lubelfeld reported a
dozen of his own students quarantined for the coronavirus. Also,
community infection rates had
ticked up from 13 to 14 per 100,000
people during the week.
"When it goes over 14 [infections]
per 100,000, that's telling me like
a weather forecast that we've got a
problem," he said. If the rate stays
that high through the week, the district will switch over to full virtual
instruction until infection rates drop.
"We're not there yet, but I'm checking this literally every day and I'm
comparing the number of live cases
and going over the math."
In spite of the uncertainty, Lubelfeld considers his district lucky. Illinois doesn't release school-related
coronavirus case data, and its overall data typically lags by seven to 10
days. The district has been able to

Getty

keep on top of new cases and make
calls about how to plan in-person
and remote learning thanks to a
close partnership with its county
health department.
Student data privacy can already
be a minefield for administrators and
student health data even more so, but
federal guidelines suggest districts
can work with local health departments for contact tracing and to keep
their communities informed about
outbreaks without running afoul of
either the Family Educational Rights
and Privacy Act or the Health Information Privacy Act.
For example, when a North Shore,
Ill., teacher contracted COVID-19
the week school started up for staff,
the district and county health department used the case as an opportunity to run parallel contact tracing
to check each agency's work and plan
how to reach out to the community.

Only three others had to go into
quarantine, Lubelfeld said, and the
district held a week of practice for
all staff and families in submitting
symptom self-checks-a rehearsal
he credits with helping the district find students who had been
infected before they arrived for inperson learning on the first day of
school.
"The cornerstone is keeping in
clear communication with our families," he said. Keeping the virus in
check requires a "triangle of information," he said, from the school,
the health department, and families.
"My hope is that our requests and
regular communication will get our
families to stand up and join that; so
that a family would reach out to us before we had to hear from the county."
Staff writer Arianna Prothero
contributed to this article.

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - September 16, 2020

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