It didn’t take long for Indiana to record a case of COVID-19 in a school.
The first districts in the state to start the new school year reopened their doors at the end of July, bringing students back into school buildings for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic closed them in March.
Part-way through the first day of school at Greenfield Central Junior High School, the local health department alerted school officials that one of its students had tested positive for COVID-19. Greenfield-Central Schools Superintendent Harold Olin said the district was prepared for such an eventuality and followed its prepared protocol.
The debate about how, when and if schools should reopen for in-person learning isn’t going anywhere.
State guidance on reopening made only suggestions for safe reopening, but mandated nothing. No plans are required to be reviewed or approved.
Now as schools reopen — and more across the state will this week — a new conversation is taking shape around how cases will be tracked, how much information will be given to the public, who is responsible for ensuring adequate plans are not just in place, but being followed, and whether it was safe to return to schools already.
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School districts across the state have released detailed plans for reopening their buildings to students. The plans cover things such as how often schools will clean their buildings, where students will be seated on buses and what happens if a case is connected to a school.
That “if” became a “when” for Greenfield-Central on day one. And while the district is one of the first to report a case, it’s unlikely to be the last.
The public may not know exactly how many cases end up in schools. In response to questions about how the state would track and report cases of COVID-19 connected to schools, the Indiana State Department of Health said it could not release those details.
"Information concerning confirmed positive cases for COVID-19 is medical," the department said in an email to IndyStar, "or epidemiological information concerning a communicable disease that is confidential in its entirety."
The department would receive information about any case that occurs in a school setting and make it available to local and state health departments for contract tracing purposes. The department said on Friday, it is "working on additional resources to ensure that schools are quickly notified of cases, but those plans are still being developed."
Thousands of students, teachers and school staff members had already returned to the classroom.
For months, the state refused to release information about cases in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In April, the health department began posting statewide data regarding long-term care facilities to its dashboard but denied requests for information about outbreaks at specific nursing homes. That data was finally released in July, after family members of nursing home residents, lawmakers, resident advocates and media, including IndyStar, repeatedly called on the government to identify the homes suffering from COVID-19 outbreaks.
How cases are handled — who gets alerted, how spaces are cleaned, when a classroom or school needs to close — may vary depending on which county it occurs in. That’s because the state has largely abdicated decisions about school reopening to local districts.
There are no requirements for Indiana schools to reopen. While there have been plenty of considerations, recommendations and suggestions from state and national officials, all those cleaning procedures and social distancing plans are totally up to schools. The only requirement for schools that convene in person is that students in third grade and up wear face coverings. Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that mandate July 22 — one week before the first schools reopened.
“That information would have been helpful for us a bit earlier,” said Jim Snapp, superintendent of Brownsburg Schools. Snapp said the district had already decided it would require masks for students returning to in-class instruction but the issue had already become a “political hot potato” and the district received a lot of flak from parents.
“I’m glad we got it,” he said. “It eliminated the conversation. But before the executive order, we felt the brunt of it.”
Up to schools
State officials have pushed back on the idea of a “one-size fits all” approach to school reopening.
Indiana is not unique here. Only half of states require districts to submit a fall reopening plan and just 12 states require reopening plans be submitted to the state for approval.
In the spring, schools were required to submit a plan for how they would continue to educate students in a remote learning environment and those plans had to be approved by the Indiana Department of Education. But nothing similar is required for reopening. The department did release a series of considerations for schools when making reopening plans, but, again, there are no requirements.
The mask mandate came after a request from the Indiana State Teachers Association and at the same time that Holcomb mandated masks statewide in an effort to curb a rise in COVID-19 cases.
Educators have asked for more, though, such as standards for when it’s safe to open schools or at what point they need to close, as some other states have done.
California and New York, for example, have put triggers in place to close schools when the rate of people testing positive for the virus climbs too high. In New York, schools can only open if positivity rates are at 5% or below. In California, schools remain closed in counties on the state’s COVID-19 monitoring list.
Dr. Kristina Box, commissioner of the state health department, said Indiana does not plan to put a similar plan into place.
“There are a lot of things that go into that factor,” Box said, “so to say, ‘this is a number we’re going to use’ is really not appropriate.
“Schools are really actively engaged in deciding what is safest and best for their students and when to open.”
'Not a single factor'
State health officials have also been hesitant to say what parameters would warrant another wide-scale suspension of in-person instruction, like the state saw in the spring when several districts closed their buildings ahead of the statewide closure mandated by Holcomb in mid-March.
In a news conference last month, Holcomb said the state will look at a variety of indicators when determining whether students will need to stay home again. The four principles considered during the state's reopening have been:
- The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
- Hospital capacity to treat a potential surge in patients.
- The ability to test all Hoosiers who have symptoms.
- The ability to conduct contact tracing on people who test positive.
"It's not a single factor," Holcomb said. "If you're looking for just one indicator that says 'they score off the charts here,' that's not it."
So local schools and communities have been left to try and decide when and if it's safe to open schools, but some have said they’d like clear rules. Earlier this summer, Anderson Community Schools Superintendent Joe Cronk called the reopening guidance from the Indiana Department of Education a “disappointment,” according to the Herald Bulletin.
Three weeks ago, the Washington Township Schools board said a lack of guidance from state and local officials drove, in part, its decision to start the year virtually.
The Marion County Health Department did develop a rating system to dictate when schools need to close or operate below maximum capacity. But it came late in the game, just last week. Districts already had reopening plans in place, some that needed to be changed just a week before they were supposed to welcome kids back.
The changes weren’t small either. Middle and high schools with more than 400 students in them can only operate at half-capacity under the new order from the county’s health department director, Dr. Virginia Caine.
Indianapolis Public Schools had already devised a system for when it would reopen schools — and it's more stringent than that put in place by the county.
Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said the district looked at what other school districts and states around the country were doing and it seemed like most were coalescing around a 5% positivity rate as the point at which they’d consider bringing students back into schools. With Marion County’s rate around 9%, the IPS board voted last week to start the year remotely and continue that way until at least October.
Most districts have not gone this far, though.
Experts in education, not coronavirus
Over the summer, USA TODAY reviewed 35 schools' reopening plans around the country. Most plans didn't include specifics on decisions that would lead to closing school buildings and putting learning online for all students.
Instead, most schools echoed some of the basic recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Deep-cleaning the area where an infected person spent time, quarantining the person, and leaving it up to consultation with state or local health officials to make decisions about school closures.
The CDC recommends dismissing school for at least two to five days after an infected person is in the building, but most school plans don't reference closing whole buildings.
In Greenfield, Olin said the district worked with school nurses to “identify all students who were within six feet of the infected student for more than 15 minutes,” which is the CDC guideline for identifying close contacts.
“Because we are able to narrow this list,” he said, "there is no reason to disrupt the educational process for the larger group that is served within the school."
For the most part, school leaders are experts in education but tend not to be scientists or medical experts, which means they end up looking to health officials to tell them whether it’s safe for school buildings to reopen.
“I did not want to get into making health decisions,” said Snapp, Brownsburg superintendent. “I know how kids learn. To keep them safe and (for information) on how the virus works, we relied heavily on the health commissioner.”
The suburban district reopened for in-person instruction July 30. It is also offering an online option for families who don’t want to send their kids back into physical classrooms. Snapp said about 12% of families have chosen the virtual option.
Snapp said things are going well, so far. By Friday, the second day of the school year, he’d been in most of his school buildings and seen good compliance with the mask mandate. Still, Snapp said he knows it's possible the district will see a case this year.
“I think it is the old, ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best’ situation,” he said. “When you look at the numbers… the likelihood that something could happen here is at least fair.
“We’ve planned for that but certainly hope that we don’t experience that.”
Call IndyStar education reporter Arika Herron at 317-201-5620 or email her at Arika.Herron@indystar.com. Follow her on Twitter: @ArikaHerron.
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