States silent on school outbreaks
California among those that don’t tell the public; teachers, parents say that’s a problem
As California’s summer surge of coronavirus cases fades and more schools transition from distance learning to in-class instruction, it’s likely some students and teachers will be infected. And there’s no guarantee the public will find out about it.
Weeks after classrooms began reopening across the country, there’s been little comprehensive information about how many have had outbreaks — and California is one of several states saying they aren’t planning to release such information.
Instead, parents are being left to rely on scattered news accounts that give little sense of how prevalent clusters of infections are among students and teachers.
“A lack of information for sure,” said Amber Lewis of San Jose, who has a daughter in sixth grade at Willow Glen Middle School and a son in fourth grade at Booksin Elementary. “It’s hard to understand when you hear some of those individual stories. With how many schools that are back live, is it just this one and they had some sort of incident?”
It’s been a problem nationally, something researchers, teachers and school officials are trying to correct. Without better information about the risks, teachers are reluctant
to return to classrooms and parents are hesitant about sending their kids.
Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University and co-founder of the explaincovid.org data website, is teaming up with public school officials nationally to survey districts for information about cases among staff and students. They hope to provide a broader picture of how prevalent outbreaks are and perhaps clues to what measures work best at reducing spread, with a data dashboard launching Sept. 21.
“There are a lot of details you’d want to know to see if schools are risky,” Oster said. “What you need to know is not just the count, but something about: How many people are in the school? Were they there in person? Did it look like it spread to other people? That’s the data we’re not getting.”
According to an NBC News survey last month, only 15 states are publicly reporting outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools. California is among nine states whose health officials said they are not releasing data detailing school outbreaks, as California has done for cases at prisons and nursing homes.
“Local health departments are responsible for investigating and responding to cases in local settings,” the California Department of Public Health said in an emailed response to questions about tracking school cases. And although the few individual Bay Area districts that had recent cases in their schools publicly reported that, there was no indication from their county health departments.
With a lack of comprehensive reporting, educators have been trying to fill the gaps, starting with Alisha Morris, a theater director at Olathe High School in Kansas who started compiling news reports of school outbreaks on a spreadsheet a month ago. As of Friday she’d found more than 9,400 cases and more than 100 deaths in more than 2,400 schools nationwide, with most in Ohio, Florida, Texas and Georgia.
The National Education Association representing public school teachers and other personnel has since stepped in to host her project through its Educating Through Crisis website. They indicate 64 California cases, including 15 students in 17 districts, and one fatality of a school employee through Sept. 9.
That smattering of cases, however, is a tiny share of California’s nearly 6.2 million students at 10,588 public schools in 1,037 districts.
Among the cases in the Bay Area were a student and a school employee Aug. 26 at San Mateo High School. Though all teaching at the school has been online, the student who tested positive was among a small number on campus in a “learning pod” for internet access and a better study environment.
The learning pod has been temporarily disbanded, and no other students or staff have since tested positive, Superintendent Kevin Skelly said.
But as of Friday, the teacher database and NEA website hadn’t caught up to a highly publicized case last week in Marin County, where an employee at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy tested positive, prompting a delay of its planned start of in-person instruction until today.
Schools across the country closed in March as the coronavirus began spreading. Reopening them in the fall has been hotly debated.
In mid-July, with cases surging across the state, Gov. Gavin Newsom said schools in areas where the virus was spreading should start online. However, the state did let elementary schools — whose younger students are least likely to suffer severe illness from the virus and most likely to have difficulty learning online — reopen classrooms through waivers. More than 400 have since received them.
And in late August, Newsom overhauled the state’s system for monitoring virus outbreaks and allowing counties to reopen businesses and schools.
Under that color-coded system, “purple” counties with widespread outbreaks cannot let schools open without a waiver, but those that are in the lower “red” tier, with substantial outbreaks for at least two weeks, can let schools reopen for in-person instruction.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco and Napa counties moved from the purple to the red tier Aug. 31, and Santa Clara County joined them Sept. 8.
While schools must notify those potentially exposed by close contact with the infected, what they report publicly about cases involving staff or students is largely up to them. And the lack of comprehensive information about outbreaks isn’t inspiring confidence in parents about returning kids to campus.
“It doesn’t seem like enough would change for both administrators, staff and teachers to feel like coming back to school is a safe option at this point,” said Jill Cleveland, whose daughter attends middle school and son elementary school at San Jose Unified. “Especially with so little information out there.”