Tag: school data

By Betsy Ladyzhets

In the COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series, we profiled five school communities that successfully reopened during the 2020-2021 school year. In each one, the majority of the district’s or school’s students returned to in-person learning by the end of the spring semester — and officials identified COVID-19 cases in under 5% of the student population.

Through exploring these success stories, we found that the schools used many similar strategies to build trust with their communities and keep COVID-19 case numbers down.

These are the five communities we profiled:

• Scott County School District 1 in Austin, Indiana: This small district faced a major HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, leading to an open line of communication between Austin’s county public health agency, school administrators, and other local leaders which fostered an environment of collaboration and trust during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Garrett County Public Schools in Maryland: In a rural, geographically spaced-out county, this district built trust with its community by utilizing local partnerships, providing families with crucial supplies, setting up task forces to plan reopening, and communicating extensively with parents.
• Andrews Independent School District in Texas: This West Texas district prioritized personal responsibility, giving families information to make individual choices about their children’s safety. Outdoor classes and other measures also helped keep cases down.
• Port Orford-Langlois School District 2CJ in Oregon: In two tiny towns on the coast of Oregon, this district built up community trust and used a cautious, step-by-step reopening strategy to make it through the 2020-2021 school year with zero cases identified in school buildings.
• P.S. 705 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York: This elementary school brought 55% of students back to in-person class, well above the New York City average (40%), by utilizing comprehensive parent communication and surveillance testing of students and staff.

Here are 11 major lessons we identified from the districts that kept their communities safe.

1. Collaboration with the public health department is key.

In Austin, Indiana, an existing relationship between the local school district and local public health department, built during the town’s HIV/AIDS outbreak in 2015, streamlined COVID-19 communication. The district and public health department worked together to plan school reopening, while district residents — already familiar with the health department’s HIV prevention efforts — quickly got on board with COVID-19 safety protocols.

Garrett County’s school district, in Maryland, worked with their local public health department on making tests available to students and staff. The Andrews County district, in Texas, also collaborated with the county health agency on testing and on identifying student cases in fall 2020 — though the relationship fractured later in the school year due to differing opinions on the level of safety measures required in schools.

“What the CDC basically said is that each school has to become a little health department in its own right,” said Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist at the University of Texas and author of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter; but “schools don’t have the expertise to do that,” she said. As a result, public health departments themselves may be valuable sources of scientific knowledge for school leaders. 

“What’s ideal — and I’ve only seen this happen a few times — is, if there is literally someone from the health department embedded in the school district,” added Robin Cogan, legislative co-chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association and author of the Relentless School Nurse blog.

2. Community partnerships can fill gaps in school services.

In addition to public health departments, there are other areas where partnerships outside a school may be beneficial; partnering up to address technology and space needs was a particular theme in this project. In Oregon, the Port Orford-Langlois school district relied on the local public library to provide technology services, space for after-school homework help, wifi outside school hours, and even extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, in Garrett County, Maryland, the school district worked with churches, community centers, and other centrally-located institutions to provide both wifi and food to district families.

Both of these rural districts faced challenges with online learning, as many families did not have wifi at home. By expanding internet access through community partnerships, the districts enabled families to keep up kids’ online learning — while showing parents that school staff were capable of meeting their needs, building trust for future in-person semesters.

3. Communication with parents should be preemptive and constant.

Strong communication was one theme that resonated across all five profiles. In a tumultuous pandemic school year, parents wanted to know exactly what their schools were doing and why;  the districts we profiled offered ample opportunities for parents to quickly get updates and ask questions.

For example, at Brooklyn’s P.S. 705, administrators held weekly town hall meetings — segmented by grade level — and staffed a “virtual open office,” available on a daily basis for parents to log on and ask questions. Jetelina said that such forums are an ideal opportunity for “two-way communication,” in which administrators could both talk to parents and listen to feedback.

Andrews County also held a town hall for parent questions prior to the start of the 2020 school year. In Garrett County, administrators updated a massive FAQ document (currently 22 pages) whenever a parent reached out with a question. This district, P.S. 705, and Port Orford-Langlois all gave parents the opportunity to talk to school staff in one-on-one phone calls. 

Cogan pointed out that parents like to be reached on different platforms, such as text messages, Facebook, and Google classroom; by giving parents multiple options, districts may ensure that all parent questions are asked and answered.

4. Require masks, and model good masking for kids.

Mask requirements in schools have become highly controversial in fall 2021, with some parents enthusiastically supporting them while others refuse to send their children to school with any face covering. But widespread masking remains one of the best protections against COVID-19 spread, especially for children who are too young to be vaccinated.

And yes, evidence shows that young children can get used to wearing a mask all day. In the Port Orford-Langlois school district, Principal Krista Nieraeth credits responsible masking among students to their parents. Though the community leans conservative, she said, parents modeled mask-wearing for their kids, understanding the importance of masking up to prevent the coronavirus from spreading at school. Some parents even donated homemade masks to the district for students and teachers.

As Delta spreads, Cogan said, it’s important that districts require “properly fitting masks that are worn correctly” to ensure that students are fully protected.

5. Regular testing can prevent cases from turning into outbreaks.

Brooklyn’s P.S. 705 leaned into the surveillance COVID-19 testing program organized by the New York City Department of Education. The city required schools to test 20% of on-site students and staff once a week, from December 2020 through the end of the spring semester; P.S. 705 tested far above this requirement during the winter months, when cases were high in Brooklyn. The testing allowed this school to identify cases among asymptomatic students, quarantine classes, and stop those isolated cases from turning into outbreaks.

School COVID-19 testing programs should test students frequently, Jetelina said. “But what’s even more important than regular testing is it’s not biased testing,” meaning the tests are required for all in-person students. Voluntary testing, she said, would be more likely to include only the families who are also more likely to follow other safety protocols.

More districts are now working to set up regular testing programs for fall 2021, using funding from the American Rescue Plan, Cogan said. If regular testing isn’t possible, it’s still crucial for a district to make tests easily available — with timely results, in under 24 hours — to a student’s close contacts when a case is identified at school. Both the Garrett County and Andrews County school districts worked with their local public health departments to make such testing possible.

6. Improve ventilation and hold classes outside where possible.

In addition to funding for COVID-19 testing, the American Rescue Plan made billions of dollars available for improvements to school ventilation systems. The Garrett County and Austin, Indiana school districts both took advantage of this funding to upgrade HVAC systems in their buildings and buy portable air filtration units.

In Andrews County — where the West Texas weather stays warm through much of the year — the school district opted for more natural ventilation: opening doors and windows, and holding class outside whenever possible. The extra time outdoors was also beneficial to the mental health of students who had been cooped up indoors in spring 2020, administrators said.

Still, outdoor class may not be possible for districts in urban areas, Cogan said. In these schools, windows and doors may be locked down to protect against a different public health crisis: the threat of gun violence.

7. Schools may still be focusing too much on cleaning.

In July 2020, Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic, coined the term “hygiene theater”: many businesses and public institutions were devoting time and resources to deep-cleaning — even though numerous scientific studies had demonstrated that the virus primarily spreads through the air, not through surface contact.

More than a year later, hygiene theater is alive and well in many school districts, COVID-19 Data Dispatch interviews with school administrators revealed. When we asked in interviews, “What were your safety protocols?”, administrators often jumped to deep-cleaning and bulk hand sanitizers. Ventilation would come up later, after additional questioning. At the Andrews County district, for example, custodians would clean a classroom once a case was identified — but close contacts of the infected student were not required to quarantine.

“Cleaning high-touch areas is very important in schools,” Cogan said. But mask-wearing, physical distancing, vaccinations, and other measures are “higher protective factors.”

8. Give agency to parents and teachers in protecting their kids.

Last school year, many districts used temperature checks and symptom screenings as an attempt to catch infected students before they gave the coronavirus to others. But in Austin, Indiana, such formalized screenings proved less useful than teachers’ and parents’ intuition. Instructors could identify when a student wasn’t feeling well and ask them to go see the nurse, even if that student passed a temperature check.

Jetelina said that teachers and parents can both act as a layer of protection, stopping a sick child from entering the classroom. “Parents are pretty good at understanding the symptoms of their kids and the health of their kids,” she said.

In Andrews, Texas, district administrators provided parents with information on COVID-19 symptoms and entrusted those parents to determine when a child may need to stay home from school. The Texas district may have “gone way overboard with giving parents agency,” though, Cogan said, in allowing students to opt out of quarantines and mask-wearing  — echoing concerns from the Andrews County public health department.

9. We need more granular data to drive school policies.

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch has consistently called out a lack of detailed public data on COVID-19 cases in schools. The federal government still does not provide such data, and most states offer scattered numbers that don’t provide crucial context for cases (such as in-person enrollment or testing figures). Without these numbers, it is difficult to compare school districts and identify success stories.

The “Opening” project also illuminated another data issue: Most states are not providing any COVID-19 metrics down to the individual district, making it hard for school leaders to know when they must tighten down on or loosen safety protocols. At the tiny Port Orford-Langlois district in Oregon, for example, administrators had to rely on COVID-19 numbers for their overall county. Even though the district had zero cases in fall 2020, it wasn’t able to bring older students back in person until the spring because outbreaks in another part of the county drove up case numbers. Cogan has observed similar issues in New Jersey.

At a local level, school districts may work with their local public health departments to get the data they need for more informed decision-making, Jetelina said. But at a larger, systemic level, getting granular COVID-19 data is more difficult — a job for the federal government.

10. Invest in school staff and invite their contributions to safety strategies.

School staff who spoke to the COVID-19 Data Dispatch for this project described working long hours, familiarizing themselves with the science of COVID-19, and exercising immense determination and creativity to provide their students with a decent school experience. Teaching is typically a challenging job, but in the last eighteen months, it has become heroic — even though many people outside school environments take this work for granted, Jetelina said.

Districts can thank their staff by giving them a say in school safety decisions, Cogan recommended. “Educators, they’ve had a God-awful time and had a lot more put on them,” she said. But “every single person that works in a school has as well.” That includes custodians, cafeteria workers, and — crucially — school nurses, who Cogan calls the “chief wellness officer” of the school.

11. Allow students and staff the space to process pandemic hardship.

About 117,000 children in the U.S. have lost one or both parents during the pandemic, according to research from Imperial College London. Thousands more have lost other relatives, mentors, and friends — while millions of children have faced job loss in their families, food and housing insecurity, and other hardships. Even if a school district has all the right safety logistics, school staff cannot truly support students unless they allow time and space to process the trauma that they’ve faced.

P.S. 705 in Brooklyn may serve as a model for this practice. School staff preemptively reached out to families when a student missed class, offering support. “705 is just the kind-of place where it is a ‘wrap your arms around the whole family’ kind-of a school,” one parent said.

On the first day of school in September 2021 — when many students returned in-person for the first time since spring 2020 — the school held a moment of silence for loved ones that the school community has lost.

These lessons are drawn from school communities that were successful in the 2020-2021 school year, before the Delta variant hit the U.S. This highly-transmissible strain of the virus poses new challenges for the fall 2021 semester. The data analysis underlying this project primarily led us to profile rural communities, which may have gotten lucky with low COVID-19 case numbers in previous phases of the pandemic — but are now unable to escape Delta. For example, the Oregon county including Port Orford and Langlois saw its highest case rates yet in August 2021.

The Delta challenge is multiplied by increasing polarization over masks, vaccines, and other safety measures. Still, Jetelina pointed out that there are also “a ton of champions out there,” referring to parents, teachers, public health experts, and others who continue to learn from past school reopening experiences — and advocate for their communities to do a better job.

Have you taken lessons from the “Opening” project to your local school district? Do you see parallels between the five communities in this project and your own? If so, we would love to hear from you. Comment below or email betsy@coviddatadispatch.com.

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series is available for other publications to republish, free of charge.

More from the Opening series

By Betsy Ladyzhets

Library partnership and community

Both of the towns in this Oregon school district are tiny. Port Orford has a population of about 1,000, and Langlois has an even smaller population of 135. The district is made up of two schools: a high school and a K-8 school, where class sizes tend to be under 20 students. The two schools have a total enrollment of about 200 students combined. Staffers at the district wear multiple hats — Krista Nieraeth, for instance, serves as principal for both schools.

In these two small towns, communication between school parents and administrators was direct — and personal. Nieraeth recalled how she often received information about students who needed to quarantine: “I would get a Facebook message [from a parent] at eight o’clock at night going, what do I do?” Some parents also called her personal cell number to ask questions or alert her to COVID-19 symptoms in their households, while district teachers had individual calls with parents before classes started. This level of direct communication reflected trust between the community and the district’s administration.

One example of community partnership was the district’s connection to the Port Orford Public Library, which manages the school district’s library system. Starting in fall 2020, the library hosted IT specialists and teachers from the school in one of the library’s conference rooms. Students were able to come get technological support or a bit of face-to-face homework help. 

The library later dedicated more spaces for after-school homework help, allowing families to come in and utilize the free wifi. Both the library and school buildings also kept their wifi turned on, so that families could sit in their parking lots and use it from their cars; the library’s wifi was on 24/7. Similarly to Garrett County in Maryland, the geography of this rural district makes broadband access inaccessible for many families.

“The biggest feedback I had was a wish for longer hours,” Library Director Denise Willms said, when asked how district families responded to the library’s services. Due to low staffing, the library was unable to operate a full seven-days-a-week schedule. Willms additionally noted that the library does not have a great ventilation system or easily-openable windows — and unlike school districts across the country, she was unable to access a government grant for ventilation updates.

Librarians and district staff ultimately brought services from the library directly to students. The school libraries were unavailable for browsing (because they were temporarily used as large classrooms), so library staff and teachers coordinated book delivery directly to classrooms. Kari Hansen, the K-8 school’s library coordinator, recalled using gloves to handle the books and reading out story descriptions to students, so that they could learn about their options at a distance before making a reading choice.

The Port Orford youth services librarian, Cheryl Frances, and school staff also produced take-home activity kits for students. The library’s kits included literacy, dinosaurs, and other STEAM learning materials. Parents could pick these activity packs up at the library, and when extras were available, library staff took them over to the school. The kits served as a way to remind students that “the library is here,” Frances said.

Social studies, history, and economics teacher Phoebe Skinner observed that these take-home activities were very popular with students and parents alike. Since the kits had “everything you need” right in the package, she said, overwhelmed parents didn’t need to hunt down extra supplies or do any other additional labor. The district additionally ran its own virtual events, such as a movie night and bingo games.

Reflecting on the school-library partnership, Willms — the library director — said that her experience embodied: “students first, community first, ego second.” Principal Nieraeth similarly said that the library, along with churches and other community civic organizations, “really would help step up and ask us, ‘What do you need?’”

“Playing it safe”

Similarly to other districts profiled in this project, Port Orford-Langlois prioritized getting students back in physical classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic. To prepare for that reopening, Nieraeth said, she and other staffers focused on spacing and ventilation. After using tape to map out every classroom in seven-by-five-foot blocks, the staff put a desk in each space.

The staff also prioritized ventilation: windows needed to be open in each classroom. In some cases, classroom assignments were shuffled around to allow proper social distancing. One class with over 20 students, for example, was moved into the library.

In addition to these precise preparations, the district opted to delay its fall 2020 semester by two weeks for extra prep time. Then, age groups were brought back to classrooms in intervals to test out safety measures and build trust in the community.

The first phase of this reopening was the youngest students, grades kindergarten through third grade. Those younger students “needed that stability” of in-person learning, Nieraeth said.

After six weeks of the youngest children in classrooms, case numbers were low enough both in the school district itself and in surrounding Curry County to bring more students back: grades four through six. Administrators had planned to bring back middle and high school students six weeks after that, but by that point, the winter COVID-19 surge had hit Oregon, leading the district to opt for caution and continue virtual learning for older students.

Nieraeth estimated that, at the start of the fall semester, 10% to 15% of the K-3 students chose all-remote learning. But, throughout the semester, more families decided to go back in person, as they saw that the district adhered to safety protocols while also letting kids play together. Parents also developed trust in the district by watching Nieraeth share district updates on social media and respond to parents’ questions.

In addition to basic safety measures like social distancing and ventilation, the district barred visitors from the school buildings, conducted daily temperature and symptom checks, and encouraged lots of handwashing and sanitation.

“My desk had never been cleaner in 20 years of teaching,” said Skinner, the social studies, history, and economics teacher.

Masks were required for all students and staff as well. Nieraeth said she was “pleasantly surprised” to see that even the youngest children wore their masks responsibly. She credited this, in part, to the district’s parents, who modeled mask-wearing for their children — even though the community leans conservative, and parents may not have been overly enthusiastic about masking themselves.

Precautions continue into fall 2021

When the spring semester started in February, middle and high school students were finally able to return to classrooms. Skinner noted that a significant batch of students returned in March, after older family members in their households were able to get vaccinated. By the end of the year, she said, out of 60 to 70 students in her social studies classes, all but eight were attending class in person. Principal Nieraeth similarly estimated that about 95% of the district’s students were attending school in person by the end of the spring semester. 

Overall, the safety measures and low community spread helped the Port Orford-Langlois schools avoid outbreaks. The Oregon Health Authority did not identify a single case in the district for the entire 2020-2021 school year; Principal Nieraeth confirmed this statistic.

In fall 2021, the Port Orford-Langlois district is continuing similar safety measures to last year, including required masks. But this semester is less likely to proceed with zero outbreaks: the surrounding county, like much of Oregon, is now seeing some of its highest case rates of the pandemic. And, in mid-August, this county reported more cases per person than any other in the state. As of September 1, 51% of county residents are fully vaccinated, per Oregon state data; teachers and staff have until October 18 to comply with a state vaccine mandate.

In a follow-up interview on Sept. 2 — four days into the new school year — Principal Nieraeth said her district was following all the protocols that worked well last year. “We’re working with our families and really reliant on them to help us ensure that we’re being safe at school,” she said.

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series is available for other publications to republish, free of charge. If you or your outlet is interested in publishing any part of this series, please contact betsy@coviddatadispatch.com.

Edit, Sept. 7, 2021: An earlier version of this story misrepresented the activity kits produced by the Port Orford Public Library; the story has been updated with accurate examples.

More from the Opening series

By Betsy Ladyzhets

Spring 2020: Combatting remote challenges, in-person preparation

Due to wifi issues and a learning curve with the district’s online platform, in spring 2020, Garrett County families and educators struggled to access remote classes. But the district used this time to prepare for its eventual return by providing computers, tablets, and wifi hotspots resources to students and building trust for the next year.

The district used a federal grant to purchase about 1,000 wifi hotspots, which were both distributed to students and set up in central locations to which families could easily drive. At a total of 650 square miles, Garrett County is relatively large, and with under 50 people per square mile, its residents are fairly spaced out. Administrators aimed to set up hotspots in enough locations that nobody would need to drive more than ten miles to access wifi.

At the same time, district staff delivered meals to families. About half of Garrett County students are eligible for free lunch, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Scott Germain, the district’s food services supervisor, quickly pivoted from cafeteria meals to meals on the road. His team brought food from the district’s twelve schools to churches, community centers, and other central locations so that families could avoid traveling more than a few miles.

Like many other districts, Garrett County took advantage of federal grant money to improve ventilation and cleaning at school buildings. But unlike others, this district stands out for a unique, collaborative strategy used to plan its return to classrooms in fall 2020. 

The district brought stakeholders together through “TIGER teams”, or “Targeted Immediate Group Execution and Response” teams. Each team was composed of people from varied backgrounds, all unified around a singular reopening-related goal, such as COVID-19 testing and learning connectivity. Teams typically included at least one parent, one community member, and one doctor, health department officer, or other relevant expert.

Similarly to Austin, Indiana, partnerships between the school district and the local public health department proved crucial in reopening. While school buildings were closed in spring 2020, the district’s nursing staff worked with the Garrett County public health department to run testing sites.

“We just became one agency, almost, for a while,” said School Health Services Manager Rebecca Aiken of the school’s nursing staff and the local health department. School nurses were able to expertly swab students who came to class with COVID-19 symptoms when classrooms opened up in the fall.

Fall 2020: Hybrid, then back to virtual

The fall 2020 semester started with a hybrid model, due to concerns about maintaining six-foot spacing between students in every classroom. Most students were coming in for two days in person, while Wednesday was reserved as a day where children worked remotely on their own, giving teachers extra prep time. A small number of students opted to stay all-remote and another small number, identified by the district as most likely to fall behind during remote learning, came in all four days. (Precise numbers are not available, but administrators estimate that 10% to 15% were in all four days during this time.)

During the hybrid period, the state of Maryland identified two small outbreaks at Garrett County schools. The state defines a classroom outbreak as at least two confirmed COVID-19 cases among teachers, students, and staff within a two-week period; cases must be epidemiologically linked but not within the same household. Maryland data reveal two cases at Route 40 Elementary School and three at Yough Glades Elementary School, from October to December.

Despite these relatively low case numbers, the hybrid model was short-lived: Rising cases in Maryland forced the district to return to virtual-only learning in November. Still, the district was better prepared this time. More students had computers and wifi, and teachers and families were familiar with the district’s online platform.

That return to remote made administrators even more determined to bring students back in the spring. In January, Maryland governor Larry Hogan ordered all school systems to bring kids back to at least hybrid instruction by March 1; this order “gave a little bit of teeth” to Garrett County school leadership, Superintendent Baker said.

Spring 2021: Communication and trust

By March 1, Garrett County students were back in classrooms four days a week. Wednesday remained an asynchronous preparation day for teachers, most of whom still had a small number of remote-only students in their classes.

Feedback from teachers informed that schedule, but the district also actively solicited — and responded to — feedback from parents. Administrators collected feedback through surveys, and principals made personal phone calls to check in on parents. Questions from parents were funneled into a detailed FAQ document on the district’s website; the document currently stands at 22 pages long and was, at times, updated multiple times a day.

“[Parents knew] we were listening, that we knew that they had questions and that we were trying to answer them to the best of our ability,” Baker said.

This detailed attention to parent feedback — combined with the trust built up by providing technology, food, and other services — may be one reason why Garrett County bucks Maryland’s overall trend in bringing students back to classrooms. According to a study published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, over three-quarters of Maryland K-12 students only had access to fully remote learning during the 2020-2021 school year. In Garrett County, though one day remained remote, 86% of students returned to almost-full-time in-person learning by the end of the spring semester.

“I think it was a real testament to the fact that the families trusted that we would keep their children safe, that we would put the safety protocols into place,” Baker said.

Indeed, between late March and early May this year, only 17 students and staffers tested positive for COVID-19 in the schools, well under one percent of the district population. These numbers do not reflect all cases in the district, according to Aiken, head of school health services, because some students were not tested through the school. She said that all of these students were infected outside the school setting — at part-time jobs, social gatherings, and other community functions — and quick contact tracing through the local health department helped prevent spread at schools themselves.

On Sept. 7 this year, all Garrett County students will be back in the classroom, all five days a week. As the fall safety plan currently stands, masks are strongly recommended (though not required), but enhanced ventilation, three feet distancing, testing, and other protocols will continue. Additional precautions may be added before the school year starts, Chief Academic Officer Nicole Miller said in an email on August 18.

Principals prepared for the transition by once again calling parents to have one-on-one conversations about their concerns, with a focus on the families who chose remote learning last spring. The health services team prepared with vaccination clinics for students and staff; the vast majority of school staff (92% as of late July) are vaccinated already, thanks in part to similar clinics in the spring. Administrators also continue to update their FAQ document, solicit feedback, and build trust with their community — building connections where wireless internet networks have failed.

“We had the collaboration, and we had the connections, and we had the framework built before this happened,” Aiken said. “I think that’s what made [reopening] so successful.”

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series is available for other publications to republish, free of charge. If you or your outlet is interested in publishing any part of this series, please contact betsy@coviddatadispatch.com.

More from the Opening series

By Betsy Ladyzhets

Public health collaboration

In planning for reopening the school district after spring 2020 closures, the public health department had “constant meetings with the school,” Combs said. The existing relationship between the school and public health experts streamlined these meetings. And thanks to past outreach efforts around HIV and opioids, the public health department already had relationships with Austin families.

“I like to think that the health department already has a lot of trust because we were in the news a lot, we were forefront a lot, so they kinda know who we are,” Combs said. “Hopefully, the majority of the county really trusted in what we said.”

Families were also likely to collaborate with the school district because they wanted their kids back in classrooms, according to Superintendent Trevor Jones. He referenced Austin’s high poverty level (27.4%, compared to a national average of 10.5%) and explained that the majority of students get free breakfast and lunch. Combined with the community’s past drug abuse issues, he said, there was ample motivation among parents and teachers alike to protect students from the isolation of remote learning.

“The safest place our kids can be is here at school,” Jones said.

While the schools had some basic safety measures in place, such as six-foot spacing, masks required everywhere except at spaced-out desks, and regular handwashing, this community trust paid off most in identifying students with COVID-19 symptoms. Deana Broadus, head school nurse at the district, said that teachers and parents acted as a first line of defense in identifying symptoms. At the beginning of the school day, teachers took students’ temperatures and asked them about other symptoms.

“As the school year went on, teachers [get to] know their kids,” Broadus said. “They can kind of tell, oh, she doesn’t look that well today, go see the nurse.”

Broadus and the other school nurses also got to know their students by following up on symptom questionnaires and developing medical histories. Some students would erroneously mark every symptom on the checklist, she said: “You get to know who’s trying to go home.” In other cases, the symptom checks inspired the nurses to keep better track of seasonal allergies, recurring stomach aches, and other chronic conditions that were previously reported by parents but not thoroughly documented by the school.

Parents took part in the informal COVID-19 surveillance, too. “Parents would call in and report certain symptoms,” Broadus said. “[Students] either needed a doctor’s note or a negative COVID test to return to school.”

The procedure was similar if a student was sent home. While the district initially quarantined full classes following a positive case, the strategy shifted to close-contact identification: figuring out which students had sat next to an infected child. Broadus said that the chief concern she heard from parents calling in to report a case was often ensuring that no more children than necessary would need to miss in-person class, though students who missed class could still follow along online.

Keep sick students home

Through collaboration with the public health department — which took charge of contact tracing for parents, staff and other non-students — Broadus found that the vast majority of school cases came from outside the buildings. 

“Usually what we found was that a parent or someone else that the child lived with was sick, and then subsequently the student got sick,” she said. And among those students, cases were typically identified quickly enough that the virus didn’t spread to others.

One of the Austin district’s major lessons from the past school year was the importance of telling families to keep their kids home if they were sick. In the past, students and staff alike tended to “push through it” and still come in if they didn’t feel well, Broadus said. Now, the policy is to stay home from school or work if you have any symptoms, not just those matching COVID-19. To reinforce this, Jones said, the district is removing rewards for perfect attendance and similar bonuses for staff. The schools are also continuing to emphasize handwashing and other good hygiene habits.

Still, the district did not avoid cases entirely. A total of 47 students contracted COVID-19 over the course of the school year, including 13 students at Austin Elementary School, 19 at Austin Middle School, and 15 at Austin High School — or about 4% of the district’s total enrollment. According to Broadus, the district identified the most cases (17 total) during November and December 2020, at the peak of the fall COVID-19 surge. The district added additional COVID-19 safety precautions at this time, such as limiting spectators at sporting events.

Delta poses new challenges

This fall, Austin’s school district is facing further challenges amplified by the country’s Delta surge. School started in-person on August 3; unlike the previous year, masks were optional. Several student cases in the first week of school led the district to switch to all-virtual classes for two weeks, Superintendent Jones said in an email on August 10.

When students return after this virtual period, COVID-19 symptom monitoring will continue — though the district is phasing out formal checklists that proved to be less helpful than parent and teacher intuition. The six-feet distancing rule has shrunk to three feet. Ventilation has also improved, thanks to grant money from the federal government for which many districts were able to apply.

Austin will continue to rely on its community to identify cases and stay safe in the new school year. “I feel like it wasn’t just one thing that we were doing,” Broadus said. “Everyone was working together.”

The COVID-19 Data Dispatch’s “Opening” series is available for other publications to republish, free of charge. If you or your outlet is interested in publishing any part of this series, please contact betsy@coviddatadispatch.com.

Update, Sept. 7, 2021: After two weeks of all-virtual classes in August 2021 prompted by high case numbers, the Austin school district returned to the COVID-19 safety protocols followed in the previous school year. Masks are once again required whenever students are not stationary at distanced desks, and desk spacing is back at six feet where possible. “We made some adjustments to our COVID procedures that have minimized the number of students in quarantine,” Superintendent Jones said in an email on Sept. 7.

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