In the lead up to school starting this fall, staff in the Eanes and Lake Travis school districts were tasked with figuring out how to effectively communicate coronavirus case numbers to the public.
The requirement to report confirmed positive COVID-19 cases to staff and families at each campus, as well as weekly to local and state officials, required both districts to build communication systems from scratch. Both districts opted to create public dashboards for the community to track cases in the schools.
Molly May, the chief student support officer in Eanes said talk about what the district COVID-19 dashboard should look like started in August. Staff looked at other districts’ dashboards to help form Eanes’ version, she said.
May said the goal was to build a dashboard that would communicate useful information to the public while being manageable for the staff members involved, all of whom were adding coronavirus-related duties to their regular workloads.
The dashboard data starts at the campus level, which district spokesperson Claudia McWhorter called the first line of defense. Families report cases to campuses, and campus staff undertake the contact tracing process and send an email to staff and families to alert them to the positive case as soon as possible, as is required by the state. Campus cases are then input into a district wide spreadsheet which is translated onto the dashboard once a day before 5 p.m.
The dashboard includes confirmed cases among staff and any students who spend time on campus, either for in-person learning or extracurricular activities like sports. May said district officials felt it was important to include both active and cumulative cases to give the community a better idea of what spread has looked like in schools this fall. As of Nov. 30 the Eanes dashboard shows, 118 cases, most of those among students at the high school.
However, the dashboard does not include a column about the number of students and staff in quarantine, which has drawn criticism from some parents who feel the 14-day mandatory quarantine for those who have been in close contact with a positive case is too strict. The two-week quarantine period is recommended by the Centers for Disease Control because the virus has an incubation period and does not always show up on tests immediately after exposure.
“(The number of people in quarantine) doesn’t necessarily provide information to the community about what’s going on in the school right now in terms of the virus itself,” May said. “Those numbers change every single day and they can change pretty dramatically. … The management of that in terms of what is that communicating to the community if it wasn’t really that helpful we didn’t feel like putting all that energy into it was worth it.”
The Lake Travis school district took a slightly different approach, starting off the school year with only active cases displayed on the dashboard and only updating the site when there was a change in the district’s active caseload. In late October, the district changed the dashboard in response to feedback from families and members of the media to include cumulative cases as well as active cases.
“Our initial goal was to provide a snapshot of current cases, active cases,” spokesperson Marco Alvarado said. “Looking at a cumulative, we definitely see the value of what is the big picture. … What parents want to see, and the community wants to see, is what has been the overall impact.”
The cumulative case count as of Nov. 25 shows 63 cases.
The dashboard is updated at least once a week, usually more often if there is a new case or a case is no longer considered active. Campus principals send information about new cases to district administrators, who share them with the communications team, Alvarado said.
In addition to the mandatory campus-wide emails about new cases, and the contract tracing process, Lake Travis schools also send out emails to individual classes and programs where a staff member or student has tested positive.
Officials in both districts say maintaining the dashboards, and communicating with families and staff, is yet another example of how the pandemic added new work for schools. District leaders in both Eanes and Lake Travis said campuses get information about new cases at all hours of the day and night and have to respond as quickly as possible.
“I think that’s the story of COVID-19. None of us went to school to learn how to respond to a pandemic,” McWhorter said. “This is just something that we’ve had to adapt to and we’re learning as we go through the process and everyday there’s something different.”
Alvarado said that everyone in the education field has taken on additional responsibilities because of the coronavirus, and running the dashboard is just one small example.
“We are responsible for communicating every time we’ve had a staff member or student who has contracted the virus. It’s our new normal,” he said. “It’s being transparent and being accessible and being able to share as much as we can with our parents and our public. It’s our duty.”
May said the most important thing is providing families with information about what is going on in the district’s schools.
“It’s about transparency around what is going on in our schools so people have an accurate picture,” she said. “Every grading period parents get to make a selection of if they want to come back into the building or stay remote, and so this is just information and data for them to have if they want to factor that into a decision.”
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