How many COVID-19 cases have there been in Oregon schools this fall? How many students and staff have been quarantined? Which schools have closed?
The Oregon Department of Education and the Oregon Health Authority can’t say for certain.
Two to three weeks after many K-12 schools returned to full-time, in-person learning for the first time in 18 months, the state isn’t publishing an online dashboard that timely and accurately displays the number of COVID-19 cases among students and staff, the numbers of students and staff quarantining because they might have been exposed to the virus and the number and names of schools that have temporarily or indefinitely shutdown in favor of virtual learning.
That lack of centralized, real-time data has left the public to rely solely on media reports or a hodgepodge of individual school districts that post dashboards in their effort to piece together a more comprehensive picture. Most notably, Oregon’s second-largest high school moved to online learning for more than a week when more than 900 people were told to stay home.
In the summer, state officials strongly urged all districts and students to send youth back into the classroom this September, saying they’d devised a long list of safety guidelines to ensure in-person learning is safe. But thus far it has been difficult if not impossible to tell how many students are becoming infected or missing school in spite of those protocols.
The lack of clarity comes as state officials acknowledge people 17 and younger have been “disproportionately represented” in recent weekly cases. Since Sept. 4, nearly 11% of all cases statewide have been among children ages 9 or younger, the highest rate for that age group in the pandemic.
Christine Pitts, a resident policy fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, is tracking COVID-19 prevention practices and policies across all 50 states and the 100 largest districts in the country. She said states and school districts should publicly report their COVID-19 cases, quarantining numbers and school closures -- because that will enable the public to determine how well current safety protocols are working.
“This is the question we all have, right?” said Pitts, who also is a Portland mother of three, a former third-grade teacher and former Portland Public Schools administrator. “I think with COVID, since the very beginning, data has been critical for establishing transparency and really developing trust with our community.”
“We just have to be upfront with our families who are sending their kids back to school,” Pitts said.
With no federal requirements in place, the availability of dashboards varies by state. In Hawaii, where a new law requiring the state to publish a dashboard took effect this summer, the public can see that 3,200, or about 1.3% of students and staff, have come down with COVID-19 since the start of the school year.
In Mississippi, the state reports 1.4%, or about 6,300 of its students, have been quarantined. In Alabama, the public can scroll district by district to see which have switched to all-virtual classes. Connecticut discloses whether students and staff who’ve tested positive were fully vaccinated or not.
Oregon doesn’t share any of that information.
The Oregon Health Authority doesn’t require schools or districts to report most or all of those particulars to the agency, confirmed Rudy Owens, a health authority spokesman who said he consulted with the Oregon Department of Education before responding to questions posed to both agencies by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Owens, however, said schools and districts at certain points during the year will give “student-level data, including attendance data” to state education officials. It’s unclear, however, when or how state officials might publicly report that those details in relation to COVID-19.
The state has no plans to create a comprehensive dashboard, Owens indicated.
When asked how the Oregon Department of Education and the Oregon Health Authority can assess whether the current COVID-19 safety precautions that they’ve mandated or recommended in schools are effective if officials don’t require that districts report COVID-19 cases, quarantining numbers and closures, Owens said officials are doing their best.
“OHA is tracking school cases and outbreaks to the best of our ability,” Owens said in an email. “OHA does not have the resources to obtain case information directly from all schools in the state. The responsibility for health and safety in a school is primarily that of the school administration.”
But the health authority does publish a weekly compilation of COVID-19 cases in schools that it has been able to learn about. At a Facebook Live Q&A session Wednesday, deputy state epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jeanne described the state’s “Weekly Outbreak Report” as an accounting that “lists every school in the state that has had a case reported.”
But that doesn’t appear to be accurate. In emails last week, Owens acknowledged deficiencies -- that it could be a few weeks before cases show up, and some cases might never make it into the report.
For example, the state’s most recent outbreak report released Wednesday lists COVID-19 cases among students and staff at 24 Portland Public Schools over a four-week period from Aug. 22 to Sept. 18, but the school district’s dashboard says there have been cases at 63 of them.
That means the state report so far doesn’t include more than 60% of the district’s schools with known infections. For some of those schools, three weeks’ worth of reports have been released and the state still has made no mention of cases among their students and staff.
The report also dramatically undercounts infections at schools. For instance, it lists 33 total cases at Portland Public Schools over roughly the past four weeks. The district’s dashboard, however, says there have been 223 cases -- meaning the state’s outbreak report has so far missed about 85% of known cases.
Owens said the state’s weekly outbreak report might be missing some school-related cases because contact tracers never learned of them. Owens said because contact tracers are overwhelmed by Oregon’s latest COVID-19 surge, the health authority asks them to call people who’ve tested positive only once, then text if they haven’t connected.
If contact tracers still don’t hear back, they and the state have no way of knowing if a person who tested positive was a student or staff member associated with a school and the case goes missed in the weekly outbreak report, Owens said.
But despite that possibility, Owens said that the weekly outbreak report should prove useful.
“As fall term moves forward, we’ll have a very good picture of how well school measures are working to minimize spread,” he said.
-- Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee
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