Area school chiefs push to reopen sooner
Superintendents from 10 suburban districts balk at Harris County guidance benchmarks
Superintendents leading 10 Houston-area school districts penned a letter opposing Harris County’s recommendations for reopening campuses, arguing that face-to-face instruction should resume earlier than county health officials suggest.
In their two-page letter, the superintendents say guidance released last week by Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Public
Health Executive Director Umair Shah would keep campuses closed too long, denying valuable in-person class time to students. In response, county officials said it remains too early to reopen school buildings and the superintendents misinterpreted the guidance.
Superintendents are not required to follow the county’s recommendations, though the guidance serves as a key document in the debate over when to restart inperson classes.
“It is clear that we all have the same goal, which is to return students to in-person instruction as safely as possible,” the superintendents wrote to Shah on Monday. “We thank you for the continued efforts of your departments on behalf of Harris County. With that said, we believe that the metrics outlined in the plan you have provided are not attainable to resume in-person instruction in the foreseeable future.”
The superintendents represent Clear Creek, Cy-Fair, Deer Park, Huffman, Humble, Katy, Klein, Pasadena, Spring Branch and Tomball ISDs. Combined, the districts serve about 457,000 students.
As the new school year approached and superintendents debated when to resume in-person classes, some education leaders called on county health officials to offer guidance on reopening.
Hidalgo and Shah followed through by producing several public health benchmarks that they said should be met before any inperson classes resumed. The benchmarks included cutting the 14-day rolling average of new daily cases to under 400, bringing the test positivity rate under 5 percent and ensuring less than 15 percent of patients in ICU and general hospital beds are positive for COVID-19.
Harris County likely remains at least several weeks away from meeting those metrics. For example, the county recently reported a rolling daily average of about 1,060 new cases and a test positivity rate of 13 percent.
“Harris County Public Health has made it abundantly clear that current indicators are not safe to resume in-person school activities in Harris County due to COVID-19,” agency officials said in a statement. “HCPH has taken into consideration a variety of factors in making this decision, including the importance of in-person activities for students.”
Once the county reaches all initial benchmarks, schools could begin to reopen with up to 500 students or at 25 percent of capacity, whichever is lower. As conditions improve, schools could open up to 1,000 students or 50 percent capacity, whichever is lower.
The county only recommends resuming regular classes for all students once a vaccine or other “widely available COVID-19 medical countermeasure” exists.
In their letter, the superintendents only mentioned two specific health benchmarks with which they disagreed. The school leaders wrote that the recommendations would “essentially require indefinite closure of schools to in-person instruction while awaiting a widely available COVID-19 medical countermeasure or greater staffing capacity at Harris County Public Health for contact tracing.”
However, the guidance specifies that districts could partially reopen even without a widely available medical countermeasure. In their statement, county officials said their recommendations “do not mean that in-person activities for schools will be closed indefinitely until a vaccine is available and the pandemic is over.”
In addition, recommendations do not outline requirements for contact tracing staff levels as a condition of reopening schools, though county officials said it was “one of the factors taken into account when developing metrics.”
Several superintendents did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday and Wednesday.
None of the county’s largest school districts have committed to keeping their campuses closed until Harris County meets all of the benchmarks outlined by Hidalgo and Shah. The judge and health director said school buildings should remain shuttered metrics are met.
“I think the biggest challenge is just folks that want to reopen now,” Hidalgo said last week. “That’s not what this document is. The sense wasn’t to go and try to find what kind of data point we can pick to lend credence to an early reopening.”
Only one of the 10 school districts, Humble ISD, has started to resume face-to-face classes. Humble ISD on Monday welcomed back students receiving special education services.
However, the other nine districts tentatively plan to begin offering in-person classes at various times between Aug. 31 and Sept. 16. Some districts will start their school year in online-only classes before bringing students into buildings.
Superintendents leading several of the county’s largest school districts did not sign the letter, including those from Houston, Aldine, Alief and Spring ISDs.
School districts have sporadically reopened across the country, with some quickly shuttering campuses temporarily after a student or staff member tested positive for COVID-19. In one case garnering national attention, about 2,200 out of 31,000 students attending inperson class in Georgia’s Cherokee County School District were quarantining after confirmed cases, according to WSB-TV in Atlanta.