The Hoven school district called off school yesterday and today due to four cases of coronavirus among its students. (Hoven reported one more positive test yesterday.) Hoven is scrubbing the crap out of its building and bringing the elementary and pre-kindergarten kids back to their classrooms on Wednesday, but grades 7 through 12 are headed for online classes until further notice.
Hoven superintendent Dr. Jeremy Hurd posted this YouTube video Sunday to explain to students and parents what his district is doing to keep everyone safe and educated amidst coronavirus:
In a further effort at transparency, Dr. Hurd agreed to answer questions from Dakota Free Press. My questions are in italics; all other text below is directly from Dr. Hurd, with minor editing for grammar and one added link to the Hoven School District coronavirus reopening plan.
[DFP] You’ve told me that superintendents and school boards were told a week ago (weekend of Sept. 12) that it’s now their decision whether close contacts can come to school or not. Can you tell me by whom you were told that? Was that communication in writing?
[Hurd]: On a Superintendent Zoom call with the DOE on Thursday, September 10, Secretary of Education Dr. Ben Jones announced to Superintendents that the decision to exclude students who were close contacts from school was a decision that was “one of the most confounding” for school districts since school had started. Dr. Jones commented that in the conversations that we had with the South Dakota Department of Health that the appearance was given that close contact advice and guidance was elevated to being a requirement. Dr. Jones stated that the guidance on close contacts was not a requirement, but only a recommendation. He mentioned to the superintendents that close contact guidance was advice and recommendations to school boards for making the determinations and judgements for their individual school districts.
Dr. Jones commented that it was all about managing the risks that were inherent in balancing all the factors that need to be considered when offering in-person education to our students while mitigating the virus. It was clear that Dr. Jones was adamant that the Department of Health was making a recommendation regarding close contacts and the local boards are the entities making the decision. It was mentioned that as an example the SDHSAA made the decision to follow CDC guidelines and that school boards have the ability to make their own determinations and assume the risk.
Once Dr. Jones was finished making his comments, it was apparent that this was the first time any of us were hearing of this change. Our professional organizations such as ASBSD, SASD, SDHSAA, nor the SDEA were aware that this change would be announced and everyone seemed to be caught off-guard.
A memo was sent to Superintendents and School Leadership on September 11. The memo stated, “The Centers for Disease Control and the South Dakota Department of Health recommend that close contacts of individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 quarantine for 14 days. The CDC and SD DOH provide consistent guidance from a public health perspective, and we encourage school districts to consider that guidance.” The letter goes on to say, “When it comes to close contact recommendations, boards have the ability to define the conditions under which close contacts may resume attendance.”
The letter concluded by saying, “I would emphasize that this clarification also does not apply to the requirements for isolation of COVID-19 positive individuals. The Department of Health has legal standing to require contagious individuals to isolate (SDCL 34-22-18). School boards and superintendents have the authority to work with their county health officers to exclude infectious students from attendance (SDCL 13-28-7.3).”
[DFP] What further guidance have the DOH and DOE given your school on how to deal with coronavirus since that previous communication? Have DOH and DOE changed any other recommendations or rules since the beginning of the school year pertaining to coronavirus mitigation?
[Hurd] This would be the first significant change that districts have seen since school has started. We all have been confident in sticking to our reopening plans that we worked hard on over the summer months. Superintendents, their community task force, and their school boards developed plans based on the scientific evidence and guidance that was provided by the CDC and SDDOH. I think that school districts have felt comfortable following the plans they developed before school began to provide confidence to the public that they were following the what was approved by their school boards in August.
[DFP] How big is the outbreak in your community? How many positive cases, how many close contacts requiring quarantine?
[Hurd] The first COVID-19 case in our county was back on July 23 and by August 23 we had 4 positive cases in our county. I predicted we would see an increase, but not like the one we are currently seeing. Today is September 21 and we now have 39 positive cases in our county. In one month we have seen a ten-fold increase and we are not even to flu season yet.
We started with the first positive case in our community from a healthcare worker who had children in our school district. We found out about the case literally the day before school started. Since the virus was slow to enter our town, this was the first reality that the virus was here. Since, we have seen our cases outpace our recoveries and it seems as if the virus is running away from us getting it under control. Our first school case was a staff member who tested positive on September 2. Our first student case was confirmed on September 16 and as of today we have five (5) student cases of COVID-19. Currently we have a total of 23 close contacts that are in quarantine from those five positive cases, which included two staff members who have tested negative.
We have had some students and families, including my own, who have been in what I call “pre-quarantine” where an individual who received a COVID-19 test is quarantined pending a test result, often to find out the test of the family member or the students are negative.
However, this weekend we were hit with a wave after three students from the same class tested positive within two days. The other two active cases are siblings in the same household. What is concerning is that there is the potential that 23 other students as close contacts could be positive cases or asymptomatic carriers and would have had the potential to increase that number to 60 within days at school.
[DFP] What did your school’s coronavirus plan look like at the beginning of the year? What precautions did your school take to prevent pandemic spread?
[Hurd] Our plan is published on our district website. We developed a plan with the input of parents, teachers, students, and our school board. At the time, we had zero cases of COVID-19 since March. We actually felt our community would not be impacted the same way that the other counties with larger cases would. We felt we could increase focus on handwashing and hand sanitizing, social distancing, increase cleaning, and spacing our desks in classrooms. We did not implement a plan for masks because we did not have cases and felt we would approach that issue when we did have cases.
For four weeks we were in LEVEL 1-GREEN and we were doing everything right at school. We cruised through the first four weeks without masks and no cases.
That was until last week. It was surprising to go from zero cases to five cases in just four days. Everything changed in an instant and it has shaken the ground beneath our feet.
Our school is closed for the next two days as we deep clean and prepare to transition to our next phase. Our 7-12 grade will transition to Flex and E-Learning on September 23 until further notice. Our Elementary will reopen because we have zero cases or close contacts in our Elementary school at this time. We are fortunate to bring back our Elementary students because online learning for that age group is much more difficult to deliver.
[DFP] Has your school been able to keep up with contact tracing?
[Hurd] We have been able to keep up, but since my cases were identified on the weekend, I worked non-stop on Saturday and Sunday to keep up. Not to mention the communication out to parents, communication with staff, development of plans, distribution of materials to students, and a slew of phone calls and e-mails.
When cases like this hit your school, it is literally all hands on deck. I don’t have the assistance of a principal because I also serve as the K-12 Principal, so it can make balancing what needs to be done difficult.
The phone calls I received from the SDDOH came within 1-2 days. However, I know that some superintendents have commented that phone calls are coming literally when their close contacts would be at the end of their quarantine, which is problematic. I think the SDDOH is doing their best to keep up, but we sometimes wish we had direct contact with one contact tracer.
Of the four cases I have had phone calls with, I have had four different contact tracers. It certainly would help to streamline things more, but I know this may not be practical. The SDDOH has provided Superintendents with a contact tracing form that helps contact tracers make phone calls and this has been valuable for them.
I will say that it took me an entire day to compile the information and attempt to collect this from each student. I think some students are reluctant to identify their classmates as close contacts because of the stigma of the virus and not wanting to be the reason their classmates can not attend school. It is challenging and time consuming for sure.
[DFP] What will the shutdown [at Hoven] look like?… Do your rural students have sufficient Internet access and gear to move classes online?
Our 7-12 grade students will begin Flex and E-Learning on Wednesday. We will have them there for the rest of the week and may extend it next week as well. We will re-evaluate the situation after quarantine dates come back as to when students can return. Our PK-6 students will come back face-to-face on Wednesday. We made this decision because we do not have any students in the Elementary who are positive of close contacts and it makes sense for us to do that.
In regard to internet access, we were surprised to know that only a handful of families did not have internet at home. It is certainly becoming more common. For any families that let us know they don’t have internet, we will work with them to make sure they have the ability.
When our students go online on Wednesday, we made changes to mimic our school day and schedule. Students will have to login at the beginning of every class and teachers will conduct classes in their classrooms at the regular times. Attendance is mandatory and students must be online five minutes before the start of every class. We are increasing our expectations for students because we have been preparing them since the beginning of the school year for this reality. We feel that they are adequately prepared to know what to do in their online courses. We also know that the closure is temporary and we will return to face-to-face instruction when the majority of our students are healthy and no longer in quarantine.
[Hurd] Final Comments
I think one of the biggest things that will need to change in the coming months is the issue of testing. I feel our state must increase its capacity to deliver testing to potential positive cases as well as close contacts. When we know who is and who is not positive, it will help schools make better decisions. A negative test result gives people peace of mind and allows for better control over the virus.
I think we are not doing a good enough job testing close contacts and the CDC has recently changed guidance that recommends this happen. We can not reasonably expect a student or staff member to come out of quarantine for 14 days as a close contact and turn around and either test positive or be a close contact again a week later and miss another 10-14 days. This is creating the impractical advice that Dr. Jones is mentioning.
Districts are also struggling with the speed of testing, which could exclude a staff member or student from attendance for 5-7 days, only to find out they are negative. This is simply unacceptable. Some rural health care providers have to send their tests to other places and the lack of testing speed and capability needs improvement.
Lastly, contact tracing from the SDDOH needs to be timely. If a contract tracer is making contact with Superintendents within 1-2 days, that is more than adequate. However, for calls to come later than that will only increase the spread of schools and create more school closures in the month ahead. If you don’t get out in front of the virus, it is only a matter of time before the virus will rear its ugly head and come back to bite you.
Krsti Noem…the Trump worshiper…sets the agenda for COVID-19 response here in South Dakota, not the SD DOH. Just look at the CDC never-ending mixed messages (due to Trump’s manipulation) of the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Confusion and you can see where Kristi gets her cues from. When you have a governor who doubts that masks are of any value, even while the positivity testing results are zooming up, no wonder there is mass confusion and lack of progress in containing this virus. GO visit any public event here in South Dakota and observe the ridiculously low mask usage and the high number of unmasked elderly and physically challenged attendees.
Read Dr. Hurd’s comments about the the Department of Education’s seeming reversal. Secretary Ben Jones sounds like he’s trying to remove the state from any responsibility for telling anyone not to come to school. It sounds like he’s trying to insulate Governor Noem from any such responsibility and allow her to claim that she has never ordered anyone to change their daily activities due to coronavirus.
The state is pushing hard decisions down to the local level. I do respect local control, and I’ll even accept that coronavirus may impact different communities at different times, requiring different responses. But the state still needs to offer consistent guidance, and the Governor needs to stop undermining local efforts and stop putting her weight on the scale in favor of denialism, false optimism, and bad science.
Local conditions vary, so there probably is a different need in each district. As Hoven found, though, just one student fraternizing with a Gettysburg student resulted in community spread to the Hoven schools. The virus doesn’t respect district lines, so you need a state-wide, as well as a local effort.
Generally Dr. Hurd does a good job here, but I wouldn’t pussy foot around a mask requirement. Hoven students should be wearing masks on school property.
this has become a debate of values to me: what do we value; what do we not. So far, I have seen that the values we hold dear are business, high school homecomings, and a Darwinist survival of the fittest; while the values we have chosen to let slide are life, safety, and self-sacrifice. I’m not so sure that conditions really do vary that much local to local. Infections still happen the same way, at the same rate, the question is if you are lucky to be at the fringe, or if you are unlucky to be in the bloom of community spread. Waiting for the crisis to deal with the crisis is the formula for the success of community spread — eventually.
I am dumbfounded that the success of precautions is not heralded as the success of those precautions, but instead evidence that those precautions were not needed.
Here is our feckless leader’s latest iteration of wingnut factoid based on drumpf’s gut feelings (I guess).
https://www.vox.com/2020/9/22/21450772/trump-swanton-ohio-rally-coronavirus-affects-virtually-nobody
200k plus dead but it really doesn’t affect anyone.
The dynamic between allowing things to take their own course and, on the other hand, doing something to thwart that course seems way too problematic in this COVID era, much more problematic than it should be. It should not be a matter of acting either at the top or acting at the bottom, of pushing difficult decisions down or of leaving them to the top, but a matter of both and all parties acting responsibly.
Any organization of higher education operates at several levels with regard to academic honesty, for example. The South Dakota Board of Regents has policies on academic honesty, and its local institutions duplicate and translate those policies within their respective local contexts. Unfortunately, I’ve known many a do-good professor who think proctoring of examinations is too strict a practice–thinking it will destroy their ‘popularity’ among their students—and who default to a foolish “students who cheat are only hurting themselves by cheating” mentality, foolish since honest students end up bearing the brunt of a classroom so mismanaged. If students are more likely to cheat when exams are unproctored than when they are proctored—as multiple research papers have shown (see below for a recent example)—it is irresponsible for professors to fail to suppress cheating by failing to proctor exams. Such a laissez faire approach is representative of a teacher not acceding to their level of responsibility. And such an approach is contrary to policies at the local and regental level.
Similarly, would one let brucellosis run rampant in one’s herd when one had the means to do something about it, namely, had a vaccine available? The State of South Dakota FROM THE TOP mandates certain cattle and bison brucellosis vaccination requirements by statute (SDCL 40-7) and administrative rule (ARSD 12:68:05). But in the case of COVID no mandate of any kind–whether in word or deed–has been forthcoming from the top mouthpiece in the State other than a few namby-pamby public service announcements.
From every indication here in West River, the ‘herd’ either flaunts minimal mask requirements in stores, thinks that COVID is something that pertains only to China, is ignorant of public health concerns, or all three. It takes multiple and duplicative levels of education and enforcement to reduce these negative behaviors.
The fundamental question remains: What is Noem actively doing in either word or deed that would keep the slope of our COVID infections coming down? Dr. Hurd looks like a strict proctor by comparison with either Noem or with the local population here in West River, and he would do nothing but benefit by reinforcement from other available parties in the State.
[Dave provides this link for further reading.]
I have noticed certain red run states issue orders from the guv that cities cannot act on their own and close down businesses or schools.
Truly ironic, mike from iowa, and symptomatic of a conflicted nation, rudderless, that can’t play off the same sheet of music during a national health crisis.
The governors you cite are exercising suppression every bit as Noem refuses to do so. Add to the mix that Noem evidently is unable to distinguish suppression carte blanche from the suppression of specific and detrimental behaviors within the population during a pandemic, the suppression of which would promote the general welfare. This confusion on Noem’s part calls into fundamental question her relation to the function of law within society, and ultimately raises a red flag regarding her competence to govern.
Very interesting read. How long before Superintendent, Principals, AD’s, and just everybody at the school become burned out? I’ve heard other stories where school leaders in these small towns are putting in long hours 7 days a week trying to make it work.
AD’s are rescheduling events and officials trying to keep the games, verses cancelling the game. Officials have issues as well where they may be in quarantine, so they must find new officials. It just goes on and on what these school employees are having to do to try and keep the school open.
I’m reading Scott’s comment about burnout in the context of O’s comment about values. Dr. Hurd’s nonstop work over the weekend arose because he appears to value public health, information, and communication. He wants to make sure all of his community members have the information they need to understand the decisions he is making and to take action that will minimize the spread of coronavirus.
Many school officials are exerting themselves because they value normalcy. They and their boards and their constituents want everything to go like it always has. They don’t want to change their way of doing school, work, or recreation. If any school leaders are feeling burnout or getting the sense that their staff are burning out, they may reach the point where they have to ask if normalcy is worth all the extra effort… or if working so hard to keep things “normal” is already so far from normal that they’ve lost the battle for their underlying value of normalcy and that they would get better results by abandoning normalcy and applying their effort more efficiently toward change, toward building a very different, temporary, but serviceable system of education that better protects everyone from coronavirus.
I mentioned local control for local conditions; O smartly questions whether local conditions are really that different. His fair point finds support in Dr. Hurd’s own comments. Look at what Dr. Hurd said about Hoven’s original plan, not adopting masks, focusing on hand-washing, cleaning, and spacing out desks. They stayed at Level 1 “Green”, with no cases, for four weeks. They thought they would be fine. But then they had their spike. Every locality has to deploy the full spread of prevention of measures, including wearing masks and moving to hybrid or remote school.
Having to decide when to change course, what to cancel, what to keep, what to do differently, what to completely overhaul, how long to do it, has to be wearing on school leaders. It’s what they’re paid the big bucks for… but instead of the Governor and the Department of Education putting everything on their backs, our state leaders could reduce the strain on our local school leaders by announcing a statewide school plan, back with state dollars, staff, and coordination, to move classes online and to call off intermural school sports and other activities for a month, to reduce travel and exposure and give the virus a month to settle down.
Chamberlain has put its middle school and high school classes online this week.