Students in all Brown County schools will be able to go back to school in person on Tuesday if they hadn’t been already.
Parents received an email from Superintendent Laura Hammack this afternoon. District leaders had planned to reevaluate schools’ educational delivery plans on this date.
The county’s color code status from the Indiana State Department of Health continues to be on “red,” indicating high spread of the virus, “which is a concern,” Hammack wrote. Brown County has been under red-level restrictions for eight weeks already.
However, daily data tracking at all Brown County Schools does not show “any significant elevation in data points,” Hammack wrote.
District leaders have been tracking three measures in each school: total COVID-related absences due to close contacts, positive cases or awaiting test results; COVID symptoms; and confirmed positive COVID cases.
“Many of the situations where metric No. 1 (COVID-related absences) has been elevated were due to an active case that indicated a large number of close contacts on athletic teams or elementary classrooms,” she wrote.
Even with those elevated totals, all schools are forecast to be well below the 20-percent threshold for total COVID-related absences and well below the 11-percent threshold for COVID-related symptoms by Jan. 19, Hammack said.
“With all data points being considered, our plan is for all schools to return on the Green Level of our Covid-19 Educational Service Delivery Plan on January 19,” the parent message said.
Green level means that all students attend school in person every day. If a student chose the 100-percent remote option, they may continue to participate in that format.
“As with all of our response protocols during the pandemic, should this decision prove to not be a good one, we will readjust,” the message said. “Hopefully we have proven throughout the pandemic that we are deeply committed to using data to drive our decision making. If the data support a transition away from the Green Level in the future, we will make that transition happen.”
Students are not in class on Monday, Jan. 18 due to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
This past week, Helmsburg Elementary had been on red status most of the week, Brown County High School and Brown County Junior High School had been on yellow (hybrid schedule), and Van Buren and Sprunica elementaries had been on green.
Parents can keep tabs on how their school is doing each day in terms of symptoms, absences and confirmed COVID-19 cases at browncountyschools.com/covid-19-updates under “daily metric report.”
