16 new COVID-19 cases reported at Greenwich schools.

GREENWICH — As spring break comes to a close for students and teachers, the Greenwich school district is reporting 16 new cases of COVID-19 in the last week.

Staff and students have been off since April 11 amid the largest spike of COVID cases the school district has seen this school year. Greenwich High School has been especially hard hit, with 16 cases reported in one day last week and entire athletic teams in quarantine.

But the week off has brought with it a relative slowdown in new cases. In the district’s Tuesday update, 10 cases were reported. An additional six coronavirus cases were reported on Friday, bringing the district’s total since the start of school to 611.

Acting First Selectman Lauren Rabin said in the town’s weekly COVID-19 update that Greenwich is seeing the highest number of new cases in the zero to 10-year-old range and the 11- to 20-year-old cohort. “The thought is a lot of that is vacation-related and sports-related.” she said.

The uptick in numbers has likely been driven by new, easier to spread variants of the virus. Rabin said. “It’s much easier for a child in the household to get the new variant and for it to spread pretty quickly to all the other children in the household,” she said.

The town is awaiting the numbers for next week, when the district’s staff and students return to school, she said.

Following the holiday and winter recesses, in January and February, respectively, the school district saw bumps in the number of new COVID-19 cases, as students and teachers returned to class presumably after traveling and/or seeing family and friends.

The district’s Director of Communications Sasha Houlihan said Thursday that Greenwich Public Schools is expecting a full return to in-person learning on Monday in the district’s classrooms.

There are 30 active cases affecting nine schools. For the second update in a row, the number of active cases at Greenwich High is down. There are currently 11 current cases at the school.