As students across Shelby County are returning to class, the health department has said it will not release school-specific data on COVID-19 infections. Instead, it will report the information by school district, even as some parents worry that it’s not enough to make decisions about safety.
There are over half a dozen school districts in Shelby County, ranging from Lakeland, with two schools, to Shelby County Schools with over 200. As such, some concerned parents want a more granular breakdown of positive cases in classrooms.
A few districts in the state are already doing so. In middle Tennessee’s Putnam County, for example, the district tracks and posts online the number of positive cases in each school. It also discloses the number of children and staff who have been isolated or quarantined.
James Aycock’s two children attend a public school in Memphis, so they’ll be starting the fall semester online. But when in-person instruction resumes, he says the state’s largest school district needs to be more specific about which schools have outbreaks so they can better assess the risk.
“I do very much care about all of Shelby County,” he says. “But what’s happening in all of Shelby County doesn’t inform necessarily—it doesn’t tell me—what’s happening at my kid’s school in that building.”
Per a new Health Department directive, schools are required to work with the department to identify students, teachers and staff who may have come within six feet of an infected person for more than 10 minutes. Families of those affected should be notified within 12 hours, but the school is not required to send notice to the entire student body.
Health Department Director Dr. Alisa Haushalter says other criteria is also used to determine who is at risk of exposure to the virus and should be quarantined.
“We also get information on whether [the infected person] did wear their mask...whether they had a cough, or didn’t have a cough,” she said, adding that they consider a person’s movement throughout the day. “All that’s used to come to a scientific approach to determining who’s a contact.”
Gov. Bill Lee’s administration has erred on the side of limiting public information about COVID cases in schools due to health privacy concerns. He’s said he’s seeking guidance from federal officials about whether he can have districts release more data.
Haushalter says the local health department will follow the state’s lead.