MCPS COVID-19 Dashboard February 2, 2022:
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. (7News) — Three days after rolling out a new color-coded COVID-positivity model, Montgomery County Public Schools said it is eliminating the concept, effective immediately.
In a Friday afternoon letter to its entire school community, MCPS explained it wants to closer align with other large school systems across the country when it comes to keeping schools safe during the Omicron chapter of COVID. MCPS also noted that it reached this decision after the state of Maryland provided "clarifications" on the "appropriate use of thresholds for transitioning to virtual learning."
"The state of Maryland does not currently recommend any automatic trigger or threshold for the suspension of in-person learning," MCPS' letter said in part. "Therefore, MCPS will no longer use a threshold of 5% or more of unrelated students and staff in a school who test positive in a 14-day period to consider a transition to virtual learning."..
MCPS released a separate PDF showing just the COVID-19 positive cases that were reported during the winter break as of January 1, 2022. The MCPS winter break COVID-19 positive chart showed 3,686 student and staff cases reported for just the 10 day winter break.
There was a average of 369 COVID-19 positive cases a day reported to MCPS over the 10 day winter break.
That is approximately a 14,200% increase in daily cases over winter break compared to the previous four months of school.
The MCPS COVID-19 Positive Data for Winter Break has been posted on a separate page from the MCPS COVID-19 Dashboard.
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.
