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Photo by Jon Anderson
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Hoover school board members Deanna Bamman, left and Amy Tosney listen to a report about COVID-19 statistics during a Hoover Board of Education meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
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Mark Conner, an engineering teacher at Hoover High School, speaks to the Hoover Board of Education about his concerns with returning to in-person instruction five days a week during a school board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
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Hoover schools Superintendent Kathy Murphy talks to the Hoover Board of Education about COVID-19 statistics during a school board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
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Hoover school board President Deanna Bamman talks about the difficulty of making decisions about in-person instruction due to COVID-19 statitics during a Hoover Board of Education meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020.
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Photo by Jon Anderson
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Hoover schools Superintendent Kathy Murphy, at left, talks with the Hoover Board of Education about COVID-19 statistics during a school board meeting on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020. Also shown here are school board President Deanna Bamman and Vice President Amy Tosney.
Hoover school officials on Thursday night said they are reassessing their plan to allow students to return to five days of in-person instruction per week on Sept. 21 as COVID-19 conditions appear to have worsened in the last couple of weeks.
Superintendent Kathy Murphy said she would love for students to be able to come back to school in person five days a week instead of just two days per week on the staggered schedule that began Aug. 20.
“We may be able to do that, and we may not,” Murphy said.
Some of the data that school officials have been tracking is heading in the wrong direction, she said.
COVID-19 statistics were in a better place on Aug. 31 when she reminded everyone of the plan to let students come back to school five days per week on Sept. 21, Murphy said during a school board meeting Thursday night.
'VERY HIGH RISK'
But now both Jefferson and Shelby counties are back in a “very high-risk” COVID-19 category based on assessment criteria being used by the Alabama Department of Public Health.
The key indicator used by the state to identify the risk of community spread is the number of new cases. In Jefferson County, there were 82 new cases on Aug. 20, and that had increased to 94 on Sept. 9, according to data from bamatracker.com. In Shelby County, the number of new cases increased from 10 on Aug. 20 to 53 on Sept. 9.
Most every county in north central Alabama currently is listed as having a “high” rate of infection, or greater than 100 confirmed cases per 100,000 people in the previous 14 days. That has been true of Jefferson and Shelby counties since at least May 22, Murphy said.
Jefferson County has 264 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents, and Shelby County has 332 per 100,000 residents, data shared by the Hoover school system shows.
The percent of people testing positive for COVID-19 out of all those tested currently is 10.14% in Jefferson County and 10.16% in Shelby County, Murphy shared. Health officials say they would like to see fewer than 10% of test results coming back positive.
There are many other data indicators that Hoover officials are monitoring, including hospitalization rates, acute care and intensive care bed capacity, and deaths.
HOOVER SCHOOLS' COVID-19 CASES
They’re also tracking cases within the school system itself.
Among the 13,424 students in Hoover City Schools, 26 students had reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 over the summer and another 21 since school started Aug. 20, for a total of 47 (.35% of the total student population).
Among the 1,878 school system employees, 27 reported testing positive over the summer and another seven since school started, for a total of 34 (1.81% of the total school system workforce).
On Thursday, there were seven students in isolation for positive test results, 17 for “suspected positive” cases and 109 who were quarantined because they had been in close contact with someone who tested positive, for a total of 133 in either isolation or quarantine (.99% of the student population).
There also were five school employees in isolation for positive results, two for “suspected positive” cases and 14 in quarantine because they had been in close contact with someone who tested positive, for a total of 21 employees (1.1% of the total system workforce).
Mark Conner, an engineering teacher at Hoover High School, noted that the percentages being shared from the Hoover school system were not comparable to the “positivity rates” being shared by health officials because Hoover’s percentages reflected the entire student and employee populations, while the “positivity rates” shared by health officials only consider people being tested. Murphy concurred and noted Hoover schools are not testing students.
SOME PARENTS AND TEACHERS CONCERNED
Conner was one of two Hoover High teachers and a parent who expressed concern to the school board Thursday night about the plan to return to in-person instruction five days a week.
Conner, who is in his 18th year as a teacher at Hoover High, said it would be “incredibly premature” for students to come back five days a week given the current environment.
Brad Coltrane, who is in his 22nd year of teaching English at Hoover High and who has a son in school there now, said the school district’s reopening plan was excellent and working extremely well.
Right now, with staggered scheduling, he has up to 16 students at a time in his classroom and they stay 6 feet apart all the time, but if all the students who chose in-person instruction start coming five days a week, he’ll have 24 to 26 in his classroom and social distancing will be impossible, he said.
That doesn’t scare him personally, but he’s concerned about contracting COVID-19 and giving it to his parents, he said.
“I feel like we’re making real improvement as a community, but we can’t make the disease stop just because we want it to,” Coltrane said. He advised the superintendent and school board to err on the side of caution.
Conner, who said his wife is at high risk if she contracts COVID-19, echoed that sentiment and noted that Hoover High had to be shut down completely for two days last week for just two cases of COVID-19.
Karli Morris, a parent, said the idea of so many students at school five days a week terrifies her, with the current positivity rate in Jefferson County. Even if kids are able to spread out somewhat in classrooms, she’s concerned about lunchtime when they will have their masks off.
She believes a lot of parents who chose in-person instruction believed Hoover officials when they said they would follow the science when making decisions about how to safely deliver instruction, but she’s concerned they’re not paying enough attention to the science.
ACADEMIC CONCERNS
Murphy said school officials indeed are tracking a wide variety of data and she takes it all seriously.
The health, safety and welfare of students and faculty come first, but “this is all a risk-versus-benefit proposition,” Murphy said. School officials also have to keep in mind whether students are making adequate progress academically, she said.
As fabulous as teachers did with delivering virtual instruction on short notice in the spring and again at the beginning of this school year, it’s not as good as in-person instruction, and new data coming in about students’ progress is concerning, Murphy said.
Ron Dodson, a central office administrator, said fall benchmark testing done for Hoover students indicates children have lost little ground, if any, in reading, but preliminary data indicates a 6% to 10% drop in math skills from where students were last year, which he attributes to the “COVID slide.”
Murphy said she knows there have been spikes in COVID-19 infection rates after Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, and she expects there may be another spike soon because of the Labor Day holiday that just occurred.
She’s not quite ready to make a final decision about returning to in-person instruction five days a week, she said. School officials will keep monitoring the data and try to determine that over the next several days, she said.
“What I don’t want to do is to have us go back to school only to have to shut school down,” she said.
School board President Deanna Bamman said she knows some parents want to know what will happen Sept. 21 now so they can make plans about child care and how to handle their jobs, but the situation changes daily.
“It’s hard. I know it’s hard,” Bamman said. “We’re all in this together, and we are all trying to take this one day at a time. Please, all I ask is that you all have some patience with us as we work through this.”
