Days after welcoming back thousands of youngsters for a new school year, one filled with promise after many dark months of pandemic-caused school closures, Inland Empire districts are grappling with an explosion of coronavirus infections among students and teachers.
The cases have prompted notices to parents that their children may have been exposed and led to confusion — and anxiety — as families confront requests to quarantine kids at home for 10 days.
“People are very concerned about the safety of their children,” said Richard Carpiano, a public health scientist and professor of public policy at UC Riverside.
Virus cases are popping up on campuses everywhere. Here are some examples:
- One private school — Ontario Christian High School — delayed the start of its school year for almost two weeks when close to one-third of its teachers fell ill.
- On Tuesday, Aug. 17, almost 300 Elsinore High School students were sent home after potentially being exposed to infected students, Melissa Valdez, a Lake Elsinore Unified School District spokesperson, said. That number represented about 18% of its 1,610 students. Across the district, 500 students at seven schools have been sent home since the school year began, she said.
- Hemet Unified School District saw a “sudden increase” in cases Friday, Aug. 13, spokesperson Sonia Ramirez wrote in an email, prompting 54 students to be excluded from class.
- In Redlands schools, 61 cases were reported this school year — as of Friday, Aug. 20 — and 93 students were determined to have been in close contact with them, MaryRone Shell, Redlands Unified School District spokesperson, said via email. A total of 154 district students were asked to quarantine, Shell said. Late Friday, Superintendent Mauricio Arellano announced in emails the delay of back-to-school events at middle and high schools.
- In the Corona-Norco Unified School District, one of the region’s largest, spokesperson Evita Tapia-Gonzalez said officials had “full classes of 34 students stay home to quarantine.” It happened twice since July 6, when year-round campuses began the school year.
- Another large system, the San Bernardino City Unified School District, quarantined three classes because all students inside them had been in close contact with infected people, district spokesperson Maria Garcia said.
The surge of dozens of infections in K-12 schools, while representing a fraction of student bodies, has alarmed public officials and parents and triggered a flurry of angry and anxious social media posts.
Nancy MacKell, who has a son at Elsinore High in Wildomar, took to Facebook to urge fellow parents to take the virus seriously and take precautions — “especially if they want the schools to stay open.”
The Inland region is seeing more cases among schoolchildren than it did last spring, Carpiano said, in part because schools are reopening as the delta variant is dominating infections and driving up hospitalizations.
“Delta is a much more aggressive variant and more infectious,” he said.
Delta also is spreading more readily among children than did other strains, Carpiano said. At the same time, he noted, only children age 12 and older can be vaccinated.
On Friday, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 31 new deaths from COVID-19. One victim was a teenager with underlying health conditions between 12 and 17, a news release states.
Michael Osur, assistant director for the Riverside County Department of Public Health, said the situation in schools is reflecting what is happening in their communities.
“When schools opened up last spring there was less COVID in the community,” he said, and hospitalizations were tracking sharply downward.
Schools are now seeing a resurgence that followed California’s June 15 reopening, an abandonment of masks and social distancing and the belief that the pandemic was over, Osur said.
Osur added that an outbreak is declared to have occurred when there is a report of three linked cases at a particular location — linked in the sense that the virus was spread directly among the three people.
To boost protection, he urged parents to arrange for children to get vaccinated. County health spokesperson Jose Arballo Jr. said 32.3% of Riverside County youths ages 12 and 17 are fully vaccinated, and 43.6% have received at least one dose of vaccine.
Schools must report each virus case to their respective county health agency within 24 hours, said Justine Rodriguez, a spokesperson for San Bernardino County’s health department.
Several school systems have created “dashboards” on their websites to list campus infections. Among them are the Chaffey Joint Union High, Claremont, Corona-Norco, Hemet, Murrieta Valley, Pomona and Riverside school districts.
The San Bernardino City district, which enrolled 46,714 students for a school year that began Aug. 2, expects to launch a dashboard in about a week, Garcia said. Moreno Valley Superintendent Martinrex Kedziora said his district, which has more than 32,000 students, expects to unveil one by Sept. 1.
Riverside County officials are exploring the idea of creating a similar dashboard to list coronavirus cases at all county school districts, Osur said. San Bernardino County has a schools dashboard. However, Rodriguez said statistics reported on the site aren’t cases at district campuses, but rather all cases occurring within a district’s geographic area.
Districts such as Pomona have been staging vaccination clinics on campus to help staffers and students get COVID-19 shots.
Pomona Unified spokesperson Oliver Unaka said via email that, when confirmed cases are reported, teachers are immediately sent home and students go to an isolation room while parents are called to pick them up. Officials investigate by interviewing the student, if they’re “of age and have parent permission” to get names of those they’ve been close to. Anyone with a positive case is on quarantine for 10 days, as are those who had close contact with those individuals, he said. A “general Information letter” alerts the entire school community, including all staffers and families of students, Unaka said.
Similarly, Riverside Unified spokesperson Diana Meza said her district uses a “contact tracing” nurse to call the parent of a child who tested positive, or the staff member, to identify who may have been exposed. A “schoolwide notification letter” is sent to all staffers and families, she said.
In Corona-Norco schools, where there were 128 active cases as of Friday, students who have been in close contact with an infected person get a phone call and letter that specifies what they are expected to do during their quarantine, Tapia-Gonzalez said.
In Murrieta schools, those who were in close contact get an email and a text message about the exposure, Murrieta Valley Unified spokesperson Monica Gutierrez wrote in an email.
In the Rialto Unified School District, spokesperson Syeda Jafri said those testing positive must quarantine 10 days and cannot return “until they are free of a fever for at least 24 hours, without the use of medication, and when symptoms have improved.”
Classroom seating charts can help determine who may be at risk of contracting the virus, Kedziora said.
Moreno Valley schools are using them for each classroom on every campus. They show which students sat next to, in front of and behind classmates who tested positive.
“Some kids hang around with other students at lunch and after school,” he said, adding that this also is taken into account.
While those who have been in close contact are encouraged to quarantine, they can return to school early under a policy called “modified quarantine,” officials said. Those students can go to class in person as long as they remain free of symptoms, continue wearing a face covering, skip any extracurricular activities — including sports — and agree to be tested twice.
Ramirez, the Hemet schools spokesperson, said 344 students in the district were permitted to return to class early under that policy.
The flurry of positive tests, along with the notifications, contact tracing and other responses those trigger, have created new challenges for educators.
“It’s overwhelming for every school district,” Moreno Valley’s Kedziora said. “A lot of people say, ‘Why weren’t you prepared?’ And I say, ‘Well, we’ve never had to do this before.”
Staff writer Allyson Escobar contributed to this report.
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