Monroe County Community School Corporation had no confirmed cases of COVID-19 transmission at school in the fall semester, according to corporation and medical officials.
“While that is difficult to determine, we do not have confirmation of transmission in a classroom,” Kelby Turmail, MCCSC communications officer, wrote in an email last week.
IU Health pediatrician Dr. Jim Laughlin is part of the corporation’s Metric Committee that determines when to transition from in-person to virtual learning, and corroborated Turmail’s statement.
“We have had isolated cases of COVID that have occurred in a classroom, but we've had no secondary cases,” Dr. Laughlin said. “So basically what we're seeing is that there's been no transfer within a classroom in any of the schools, whether they're grade schools or high schools since school started – zero.”
Paul Farmer, president of the Monroe County Education Association, said contact tracing, though imperfect, has linked positive cases for students and teachers to activities outside school.
“Pretty much on every single scenario, whether it's student or faculty member, custodian, maintenance worker, bus driver, cook, whatever – every single time they can contact it, trace it to somewhere outside of the building,” he said.
However, those outside activities do include school sports.
“That’s a definite given (transmission within school athletics), there’s no doubt about that,” Farmer said. “But that’s not within the walls of our classrooms.”
MCCSC schools had approximately 160 cases of COVID-19 among in-person students, teachers and staff in the fall semester.
Both Dr. Laughlin and Farmer credit the corporation’s prior planning for keeping school buildings safe.
“We have three full-time contact tracers, which, to be honest – I'm on the ISTA Board of Directors [and] I don't know of any other school corporation in the state that's putting that kind of time, effort and resources into trying to keep our staff and our students protected,” Farmer said.
Research shows elementary-aged children do not spread the virus easily. Nearly 40 percent of those MCCSC students are taking classes completely online, according to Farmer, while roughly 50 percent of secondary students have gone online-only. That not only cuts the number of people physically present at school, but also allows teachers and students to stay distanced as they wear masks and follow CDC guidelines.
“(A student) will act sick or get a fever; they'll get sent to the nurse's station, get set home, and we are able to see those kids that day or the following morning and we get the test done within 24 hours,” Dr. Laughlin said. “So then within 48 hours, basically from the time they're identified as being sick, we can let them know if they have COVID or not and then decide how long they need to stay home.”
Dr. Dan Handel, chief medical officer for IU Health South Central Region, praised MCCSC’s handling of in-person and online schooling through the first semester.
“When we look at it, people who were doing home school were more likely to test positive than people going to school,” Dr. Handel told WFIU’s Bob Zaltsberg. “I do want to give credit to the Monroe County schools. I think they’ve been very intentional about how they’ve approached this and letting the data drive in terms of when they scale up and scale down.”
IU epidemiologist and professor Ana Bento, who was named to a World Health Organization panel on reopening schools, agreed the schools’ setup was about as safe as in-person learning gets but was more guarded in her analysis.
“A lot of the cases in younger kids, they tend to be asymptomatic,” Bento said. “And we also know that they're not really testing every kid in school, certainly not every day. So given the given the rate of transmission in Indiana, particularly around where we live, a lot of cases probably were not identified.”
According to a new study from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, opening schools doesn’t increase COVID-19 hospitalizations when hospitalizations and cases are rare – below 36 to 44 hospitalizations per 100,000 people per week.
According to the Regenstrief Institute COVID-19 dashboard, Monroe County had a hospitalization rate of 17.39 per 100,000 residents from Dec. 31 to Jan. 6, the most recent weekly data available.
“As long as there’s people in classrooms and there’s still a high prevalence of COVID in the community, we are not eliminating risk by having 40 percent (of students online), we are decreasing risk of exposure,” Bento said.
MCCSC’s spring semester began Monday and the corporation is in “phase yellow,” meaning elementary students are back in school five days a week while middle and high schoolers go in every other day.
This story has been updated to show the total number of positive cases for in-person learning at MCCSC schools in the fall semester.
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