School district sees spike in virus
Local data matches county’s upward trend
LANSDALE » North Penn School District teachers and staff are preparing to return back home for a county-mandated break from in-person school.
District officials gave an update Thursday night on the most recent COVID-19 case numbers they’ve seen across the district, and the close contact they’ve had with Montgomery County officials.
“We do have two different dashboards, if you will. We have our school district dashboard, that does notate those individuals who tested positive,” said Superintendent Curt Dietrich.
“We have 11 staff members and 26 students who have tested positive since we started putting that dashboard up on October 23rd,” he said.
“It is clearly concerning to us, as we see what is going on in the community. As of this moment, we are not aware of any linked transmission within our schools — linked transmission would be where someone in our school clearly contracted the virus from somebody else in our school,” Dietrich said.
Last week the district issued a statement in response to the county board of health’s order to halt in-person instruction from Nov. 23 to Dec.
6, and the district has since posted a list of frequently asked questions and answers for parents. During the district’s school board meeting on Thursday night, Dietrich updated the board on the latest COVID-19 figures, showing updated statistics from the district’s data dashboard.
As of Thursday night, the district had noted two in-person student cases — one at Gwynedd Square Elementary and one at North Penn High School — and one in-person staff case at Penndale Middle School on that day, with three student cases (one each at NPHS,
Pennfield Middle School and Walton Farm Elementary) and two staff cases (one at Gwynedd Square and one at York Avenue Elementary) the day before.
A second dashboard available on the district’s website shows the COVID-19 positivity rates for district residents, with the raw number of cases, the incidence rate per 100,000 residents, and the percentage of positive tests all rising starting in late October.
“It is pro-rated, so that it appropriately gives weight to the size of municipality, in terms of the aggregate. And those numbers have increased significantly in the last three weeks,” Dietrich said.
“If my memory serves me correctly, we’re at 6.6
percent positiv it y rate right now, and 195 positive cases per 100,000 residents within the North Penn community. So we have that information. I think that is very helpful to people as they track those particular situations,” he said.
District officials are in near-daily contact with county health officials on how to handle the return to virtual instruction, and Dietrich told the board that North Penn has voiced its willingness to the county to take part in any pilot programs for more rapid virus testing.
“We are working very, very carefully and closely with the county on some possibilities. We’re hopeful there are some things that could emerge, in the
next weeks here, in terms of rapid testing,” he said.
Since the partial return to school in late October, Dietrich said, he and fellow administrators have visited all of the district’s schools, and on average they’ve been operating at about one-quarter capacity, with two groups of students alternating days in the classroom and six or seven students in a typical classroom each day, and a third group learning from home every day.
“I really, really want to call out the hard work that is being done by all of our members of our community. From the moment a child boards a bus, or when they arrive in the morning to school, the way they are delivered to our school, and welcomed into our school, it’s just been phenomenal,” he said.
Special thanks go to district technology and communications staff, who set up several hundred largescreen monitors for teachers to stream their lesson
plans to students watching from home, and to the board that authorized the purchase of that equipment.
“Our teaching staff is adapting very well to all of this. It is hard work, absolutely, incredibly hard work, but I cannot sing the praises loudly enough of our teaching staff, for the way they are adapting to using the equipment, and the way our students are adapting to this environment,” Dietrich said.
Board President Tina Stoll added her thanks on behalf of the board to Dietrich, his team of administrators, and all teachers and staff for working through an unprecedented nine-plus months.
“I feel like I sound like a broken record, but thank you. It sounds kind of not enough to say either, but we really really appreciate everything that you’ve done. And hopefully there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, with vaccines coming along, and we’ll all get through this,” Stoll said.
District Solicitor Kyle Somers added that he and staff are closely monitoring developments in an appeal filed by three parents against the county health department’s return-home order, with a hearing on that case scheduled for Friday, Nov. 20.
“Certainly, if there’s any outcome of that that impacts the district, we’ll certainly make everyone aware,” he said.
In a COVID-related action item, the board unanimously voted Thursday night to award a bid for supply of Plexiglas to Polymershapes, for roughly $11,500. That bid price was the lowest of four received by the district, and facilities and operations committee chairman Jonathan Kassa said the Plexiglas will be used to fulfill requests for added personal barriers in classrooms and office spaces around the district.
The board also fielded three public comments from residents related to