School leaders split on when to close campuses
Lack of state COVID mandate leaves patchwork across region
Less than a month after enrolling her daughter and stepson in face-to-face classes at Fort Bend ISD, Zoraida Castillo received a notice Saturday that their two campuses would temporarily close amid six combined cases of COVID-19 among students and staff.
If Castillo and her family of five remained in their previous district, Katy ISD, her daughter and stepson likely would not face a disruption. Katy has kept nearly all of its roughly 70 schools open since September while also reporting some of the area’s highest COVID case rates.
“It’s stressful that they’re closing the school, but I’m glad they are,” Castillo said Monday afternoon as she waited to pick up her firstgrade stepson from Seguin Elementary School. “Just taking a week or two weeks to let it cool down or die down, I agree with taking that time off.”
The differing approaches in two of the region’s largest districts illustrate the local patchwork of COVID-19 campus closure decisions during the pandemic, a mishmash resulting from a lack of clear scientific consensus or overarching mandates specifying when in-person classes should be canceled.
Faced with daily calls to shutter campuses, superintendents and school leaders across the state are creating their own methods for deciding when to temporarily move classes online. Their approaches can diverge greatly, often reflecting each local community’s tolerance for COVID-19 risk.
“There’s a lot of politics around this, and so many of the numbers and decisions are based on politics and perspectives outside of science,” Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre said. “We’re never going to have full agreement.”
Under current Texas guidelines, public school districts must provide in-person classes to all families who want it, though superintendents can cancel face-toface instruction briefly due to oncampus COVID cases or significant staffing issues. However, state officials have not set concrete metrics outlining how many COVID cases must occur to warrant a campus closure.
Harris County health authorities have issued recommendations outlining when they believe school facilities should be closed, but those guidelines are not legally enforceable following an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott. The Harris County recommendations, if enforced, would have resulted in the cancellation of all in-person classes to date, an outcome that many Houston-area superintendents oppose.
In the absence of definitive science or directives, some Greater Houston superintendents have established detailed COVID safety protocols for their districts. Many require increases in social distancing, overnight cleaning or the closure of individual classrooms when a few COVID cases are identified.
Discretion vs. hard rules
When taking one of the more drastic steps, the brief shutdown of a campus, some districts employ hard-and-fast rules while others use their discretion.
In Fort Bend ISD, where about 20 of the district’s 80-plus schools have temporarily moved online in the past several days, Dupre’s administration is making campus closure decisions based on staff availability. This approach, Dupre said, eliminates the debate over case count thresholds or other politically charged COVID metrics.
While case rates are low at some recently closed Fort Bend ISD campuses, Dupre said the tallies do not capture the number of employees required to quarantine due to possible COVID exposure. Nearly 10 percent of Fort Bend ISD teachers were absent, on average, each school day in the first three weeks of January, up from 4 percent in October.
“We’re struggling to cover our classes,” Dupre said. “We do not
have enough substitute teachers right now. We’re sending any available body from central administration to monitor classes, to keep kids safe and support the schools.”
For Terry Spurs, the decision to briefly shutter Fort Bend ISD’s Willowridge High School last week made sense once he understood the rationale. Spurs’ daughter, a sophomore, returned to Willowridge High for the second semester after remaining online-only to start the year.
“If it’s only eight cases, but you’ve got a bunch of teachers out. You can’t have class,” Spurs said. “That number might be low, but in Fort Bend, they’re real strict in regard to COVID stuff.”
In Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, administrators declared closure decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis after examining “all the evidence and the totality of the circumstances” in consultation with Houston Health Department officials. HISD interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan said her staff analyzes the number of confirmed cases, the number of people who came in contact with infected individuals and the locations where COVIDpositive people spent time on campus, among other factors.
“Then that decision is made if we just need to make sure we get everything thoroughly cleaned overnight and reopen the next morning, or if we need to close for a number of days because we still need to do some follow-up as it relates to contact tracing,” Lathan said. To date, HISD officials temporarily have shuttered several campuses due to COVID-19, often citing an unspecified number of confirmed cases among students and staff.
Numbers-based approach
In Katy ISD, the region’s thirdlargest district, administrators took a more numbers-driven approach, deciding that schools must temporarily close if more than 10 percent of on-campus students and staff have active COVID cases. District officials also may briefly shutter a campus following recommendations from federal, state, county or city health authorities.
The 10 percent threshold, however, is higher than some other districts with case rate thresholds. In Pearland ISD, for example, campuses must temporarily close if 2 to 5 percent of on-campus students and staff report active COVID cases.
Katy officials did not respond to questions about why they set a 10 percent benchmark. About 0.7 percent of on-campus students and 1.5 percent of staff in Katy report active COVID cases as of Monday, according to data published online by the district. None of Katy’s campuses is close to eclipsing the 10 percent threshold, though Cinco Ranch Junior High School went online-only Monday after reporting 38 active student cases and seven active staff cases.
Chelsea Duran, whose eighthgrade son joined more than 900 Cinco Ranch Junior High students attending in-person classes, said she supported Katy officials keeping the campus open until the past couple of weeks.
“For the amount of kids at the junior high, I think (active cases) in the teens is OK,” Duran said Monday. “But I do think anything above 20, 25 is definitely uncomfortable. It’s not even the number, but how quickly the number is rising.”
Even in communities more concerned about the health implications of reopening schools, often due to higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths in those areas, campus closures are rare.
The city of Houston’s local health authority, David Persse, said COVID mitigation efforts in schools have been been “very, very effective,” though occasional issues arise in classrooms with larger numbers of students.
Although Houston-area schools are reporting thousands of active cases among students and staff, Persse and other local health officials have said they believe the vast majority of transmission occurs off-campus. To date, Persse has not used his legally authorized power as a local health authority to temporarily close a campus to stop a COVID outbreak.
“If we’re seeing the school is the place where the virus is spreading, then I’ve got to do something like that,” Persse said. “But if we’re finding that it’s spreading in the community or other places outside the school, then we’re not solving the problem by closing a school. We’re only hurting the kids.”