Saying he wants to be as transparent as possible during the ongoing pandemic, Hall County School District Superintendent Will Schofield said the district will provide an online tracker so that parents and the community can see daily COVID-19 absences in each of the county's schools.
The online document entitled Existing COVID Positive Absences at Schools will track daily numbers at each of the 38 school facilities, and Schofield talked to school board members about the document at a Monday night meeting.
"The hard reality is we have a pandemic going on now, and we don't have any secrets in this district," Schofield said. "There's COVID in this nation, there is COVID in this state and there is COVID in this community."
Schofield said the numbers will be posted every day and the tracker will remain online so users can see the trending numbers.
"You'll see that we had 25 individuals - either students or staff - that were not able to come to school today because of a positive COVID test," Schofield said. "That's 13 staff members and 12 students across the district."
Monday was the first day of the new school year and half of the in-person learners attended class; the other half will be in school on Tuesday. The alternating schedule will continue for the first two weeks of school.
"We certainly expect those numbers of students as we get the second group in tomorrow to continue to go up, but we feel very good about where we are," Schofield said.
On the same document, parents will be able to see the percentage of students receiving temperature checks at certain schools. Students who have elevated temperatures as they arrive will be sent back home. Additionally, the document contains information about random COVID-19 test sites in different school clusters. Schofield said he and his administrative team believe one way to curb the spread of the virus is to track those who are asymptomatic, and that's why they want to conduct as much testing as possible.
"Just so parents are aware, we're not grabbing your child and testing them for COVID - that requires parental permission," Schofield said. "We did our first random testing in the East Hall cluster last week...we tested 60 people and those results were back in 48 hours and I was very pleased that it was 100% negative."
Northeast Georgia Health System personnel perform the testing.
To see a video from Will Schofield with an in-depth explanation of the COVID reporting tracker, follow this link.
