Coronavirus outbreaks are bound to occur in schools this fall despite the best preventative measures, Dr. Junda Woo, medical director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, said during a virtual town hall Wednesday.
The town hall, livestreamed on the city’s website, drew thousands of residents interested in how to safely reopen schools, and as many as 3,000 responded remotely to poll questions.
The town hall conversation included six members of the city’s advisory committee for opening schools and Woo.
She said she wanted feedback from the community as she advises school district leaders about reopening schools, which have been closed to on-campus learning since mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Woo is expected to release a set of safety indicators in the next day or two.
It will replace a directive she signed July 17 that prohibited schools in Bexar County from opening for in-person learning until after Sept. 7, Labor Day.
She had to scrap that approach after Gov. Greg Abbott said local health districts do not have authority to close schools pre-emptively. They can do so only in response to an outbreak, which Woo predicts San Antonio will have.
Most Bexar County school districts already have decided to delaying in-person reopenings until the week of Labor Day, if not later. At least two districts — South San Antonio and Edgewood — decided to remain in full remote learning until October.
Woo compared schools to nursing homes, which have been hot spots for the virus. In April, local nursing homes did not have any COVID-19 cases, but by the end of July almost every nursing home in the county had cases no matter how good their prevention methods, Woo said.
“Outbreaks will happen,” she said at the start of the town hall.
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Woo unveiled the metrics the city’s advisory panel will track to determine when it’s safe to phase in students into buildings.
The measures include the percentage of people testing positive for the virus, the number of days it takes for San Antonio’s cumulative case total to double and a decline in new cases for 14 consecutive days.
Although the average number of new coronavirus cases has fallen over the past two weeks, San Antonio only has seen a drop in new cases for up to two consecutive days at a time.
Woo has said schools should not reopen until the county’s positivity rate is down to 5 percent. It was 15 percent as of Wednesday.
Panelists also hope to include more specific pediatric data, Woo said.
Earlier in the evening, San Antonio leaders discussed the most recent information showing the effects of the virus on children.
About 12 percent of the county’s positive cases have been children, a statistic that has been pretty consistent, Mario Martinez, assistant director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, said during the city’s daily COVID-19 briefing. But he noted that 81 children were hospitalized with COVID-19 this week, up from 62 children last week.
“As we move into schools opening, it is an important indicator that we’re monitoring,” Martinez said.
The city’s current indicator bar also uses a hospital system stress score and factors like capacity for case investigation and contact tracing, which take longer to update. The metrics for reopening schools will be “more nimble,” Woo said.
Each school district should create its own panel, Woo said, to deliver feedback to superintendents and trustees who decide when and how to reopen. The panels should include a medical person who will be a liaison to Metro Health and will be tasked with reporting to the health district weekly, Woo said.
On ExpressNews.com: Here’s what going back to school will look like in Bexar County this fall
The issue of whether and how in-person learning can be made up later was a dividing issue among the panelists.
Natalie Clifford, a high school teacher, said educators can make up for the learning loss and are concerned about the trauma students will experience from the loss of family members and teachers who may die from the virus. She pointed to three people who died this summer who worked in schools: two teachers in San Antonio ISD and a cafeteria worker in Northside ISD.
“Although there are concerns on academics, we can never give back someone's life and I think that has to be centered, the sacredness of human life, in every decision,” said Clifford, who also is the high school director for Harlandale ISD’s teachers union.
“It really would weigh so hard on the educators conscience to know that our students would come to school and be infected and share that with their family,” Clifford added.
Superintendents Brian Woods of Northside ISD and Pedro Martinez of San Antonio ISD said that for some student groups, virtual learning just is not sufficient.
“While I agree that learning loss can be ameliorated over time, I hear it said like it can be fixed in a couple of weeks. That is just not true,” Woods said. “And every amount of learning loss that we experience will take months in order to fix. I don’t want to ignore … the public health needs of our city, but at the same time I don’t think we can just completely downplay the need for some students to be back in buildings as soon as it is safe to get them there.”
Alejo Peña Soto, an incoming junior at Jefferson High School in SAISD, said he didn’t have confidence in the district to safely bring kids back into buildings.
“I want to go back myself, but it just isn’t at this time rational this isn’t something that we can even consider until the metrics are so much lower than they are right now and I’m just really concerned hearing the conversations happening with decision makers right now,” Peña Soto said.
Krista Torralva covers several school districts and public universities in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Krista, become a subscriber. Krista.Torralva@express-news.net | Twitter: @KMTorralva
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