Guest Post: To Montgomery County Board of Education - Concerned MCPS staff member asks the BOE to have MCPS implement a clear and transparent COVID reporting dashboard.

To: boe@mcpsmd.org

Hello, 

I am writing today, as a concerned MCPS staff member, to ask the BOE to support MCPS in implementing a clear and transparent COVID reporting dashboard for the school system.

Currently, the MCPS COVID dashboard and case reports are not following a universal standard. Many schools' email notifications of positive cases never make it to the MCPS website, such as the cases reported at Sherwood HS, William H. Farquhar MS, and Lois P. Rockwell Elementary School, just to name a few.

Also, many case reports have multiple cases listed, so it is difficult to see where individual schools stand with recent cases and outbreaks. For example, Magruder HS, Blake HS, and Bethesda-Chevy Chase HS have used this notification method within the few last weeks. In fact, since December 7, Magruder HS has sent four community letters reporting 46 cases. Yet when you look at the MCPS website, there is no indication at all that there are so many cases at Magruder HS.

Lastly, MCPS is not reporting all of their schoolwide outbreaks to the state health department. Only 9 MCPS schools have been listed on the state dashboard as having outbreak-associated cases for the month of December. You can download the data here: https://data.imap.maryland.gov/datasets/md-covid19-schooloutbreaks/explore. Yet MCPS lists 452 total COVID cases on their own website. While all of these cases may not meet the school-wide outbreak definition, according to the state many schools should meet the criteria for an outbreak and be listed on the state dashboard.  

Howard County Public School System has clear and transparent COVID dashboard. HCPSS provides daily case totals among elementary, middle and high schools: https://covid.hcpss.org/

You can see each individual schools’ daily case numbers, which are categorized by student, staff, contractor, or visitor. For example, this is the case reporting for Oakland Mills HS: https://covid.hcpss.org/school/omhs

MCPS has approximately 100,000 more students than HCPSS, yet we have no idea of the number of current cases or the schools that have current cases. We do not know if there is an increased number of cases in recent weeks, and without the state/county health department reporting a current positivity rate, we need MCPS to act now to get this information to all of its community members.

It is time for the BOE and MCPS to set clear, transparent guidelines for school administrators to report and publish COVID case information.

It is also time for the BOE and MCPS to implement a clear and transparent COVID dashboard for all members of the community so that we can track the number of cases in our schools, which is especially important for both holiday/seasonal surges and new variants. At this point in the pandemic, our current method of publishing COVID cases in our school system is unacceptable.

Thank you for your time and consideration.