New Haven school district opens COVID ‘dashboard’

NEW HAVEN — Days after reopening city schools for some students amid protest around pandemic safety concerns, the district unveiled an online dashboard to provide information about COVID cases connected to NHPS facilities.

The city partially reopened schools to thousands of students up to fifth grade and some high needs students on Jan. 19, then, shortly after, district officials reported the first cases of individuals with

COVID-19 who had spent time in a classroom either teaching or learning.

As of Friday, 10 confirmed cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in people who had been inside New Haven schools were reported to the parents and staff of seven schools. The schools are: Barnard Environment Studies Interdistrict Magnet School, Bishop Woods Architecture & Design Magnet, Columbus Family School, Conte West Hill School, Benjamin Jepson Magnet, Lincoln Bassett School and Nathan Hale School.

The NHPS website had the day before debuted the dashboard to report the number of positive cases in the schools as well as how many people were undergoing the 10-day quarantine after potential exposure. The site says it will be updated every Monday by 5 p.m.

There were 131 “individuals quarantined,” as of

Jan. 29, the site reported. The online information does not detail what possible exposure led to the number of people quarantining.

Some school districts — including Stamford, East Haven, Brookfield and Middletown — have provided such data dashboards on their websites since they opened schools in the fall. Most provide information about how many teachers and students have tested positive for the virus and how many are quarantining. Some go further in reporting how many schools have been impacted by positive cases.

“The district's dashboard was born directly from community feedback expressing the desire to know the impact of (COVID-19) on our schools on our staff and students,” Middletown Superintendent of Schools Michael Conner said in a statement. “We update it nightly and it provides not only valuable counts and data but more importantly it provides I think a sense of security, health and well-being to our community.

“It sends a nightly message that our kids and our schools are safe places,” Conner said in the statement said. “Yes, the virus impacts schools too, but I think it lets the community know we are on it and we are transparent.”

As for New Haven’s dashboard, “It will be updated as soon as we get information,” Superintendent of Schools Iline Tracey said Friday.

Tracey said district staff are “working on” unveiling a data dashboard.

The dashboard debuted as the district considers expanding the return to in-person education. Factors under consideration include COVID-19 transmission rates and training of a staff of substitute teachers large enough to accommodate teacher sick days and to fill classrooms for teachers granted Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations that allow them to stay home, Tracey has said.

Tracey has said there are no determined dates for when the next phasein plan might begin.

Jill Kelly, a parent of a New Haven student and a statistics expert at Yale University, said there are certain things the district should keep in mind if it wants its reporting of

COVID data to be effective.

Kelly said the most important thing the district could do is to post the updates as text and not an image so the data can be more easily accessed. She said the district also should post current and cumulative case counts with a link to prior reports, and that data should be broken down by school building so it can be clearer whether some buildings are doing worse than others.

As of Friday, the dashboard was an image, not reported as text, and there were no links to past reports.

Overall, Kelly said she has hoped for better data from multiple levels of government on COVID-19 infection rates.

“The state reports cases in some categories so many days in arrears, they are not relevant by the time you see them,” she said.

While the NHPS dashboard does not detail possible exposures that led to quarantines, in one recent example confirmed by Mayor Justin Elicker, one teacher and eight students were told to quarantine after a teacher at Bishop Woods School received a positive test for COVID-19 on Jan. 22.