Schools work to stay open as COVID spreads

Since returning from winter break to the reality of the highly contagious omicron variant, Houston-area school administrators have spent their days trying to stay ahead of rising COVID-19 infections among students and staff in an unceasing effort to keep their campuses open.

The difference between the current spike in cases and the one at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year, school leaders say, is the number of teachers and staff isolating because of exposure to the virus and positive tests. While the omicron surge is expected to level off within a relatively short amount of time, schools are struggling to keep enough staff to continue operations until then.

“Our employee (cases are) twice as much as they were at the beginning of the school year,” Conroe ISD Superintendent Curtis Null said in a video released by the district Thursday evening. “When we see staff numbers like this, this is very scary.”

Null’s district had 409 active employee cases by Friday afternoon. There are 1,828 employees in the school system.

Conroe ISD was able to fill only 63 percent of its substitute positions on Friday, leaving 483 unfilled.

“We have reached a point where we are as fragile today as we have been through this entire process with our ability to keep our schools open,” Null said.

The superintendent said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new recommendation of quarantining for five days instead of the previously required 10 days before returning to work after contracting COVID has been essential in keeping the district open.

“If we still had the 10-day out rule, I’m not sure that we would be open,” he said.

At least 30 small Texas districts temporarily have canceled in-person instruction since the return from winter break due to the spread of the virus among their staffs. Other districts have done the same for individual classes hit hard by the virus. Many of the districts cite staffing shortages due to COVID as the cause.

Sealy ISD in Brazos County temporarily halted inperson instruction Friday through Tuesday at all of its schools due to the spread of COVID. Monday already was a scheduled school holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“Obviously, like everywhere else during the Christmas break, our cases started coming in,” Superintendent Bryan Hallmark said at a news conference Thursday. “Since we returned on Jan. 3, we had about 131 cases reported. Today, we have 93 active cases in the district (and) 19 of those are staff.”

The school system has 2,800 students and 400 staff. Of the district’s employees, 3 percent had confirmed cases of COVID on Friday.

Katy ISD has had to cancel individual classes this month, according to district spokeswoman Maira Dipetta.

“In those cases, the classrooms have reopened the next day,” she said.

In the Houston region, Aldine, Conroe, Waller, Barbers Hill, Fort Bend, Texas City, Alief, La Porte, Cypress-Fairbanks, Humble, Goosecreek, Spring and Conroe ISDs say they have not yet had to cancel in-person classes since the start of the spring semester. District leaders say their mitigation protocols have helped.

Unlike the start of the school year, the latest surge was seen in county data before it impacted schools because students were out for two weeks over their winter breaks. That gave administrators a head-start to see the impact of the new variant before kids returned, allowing time to ramp up prevention strategies.

At least 11 Houston-area districts changed their COVID plans before students returned to school. Channelview ISD announced it would begin mandating masks again due to the surge. After previously saying it would lift its mask requirement, Aldine ISD opted to continue once it was clear omicron was highly contagious. Spring and Houston ISDs also kept their mandates.

Still, case counts are increasing in most districts.

In Katy ISD, for example, there were 407 active staff cases Friday, nearly 3 percent of the district’s employees. There were 1,751 active student cases, about 2 percent of the more than 84,000 student body.

Cy-Fair ISD had more than 1,000 active cases, including 234 among staff.

Null said that while omicron is believed to cause less severe illness than previous variants, it still is having a big impact on schools.

“There would be huge ramifications if we were to close our schools,” he said. “We need to do all that we can to make sure that does not happen.”