How will parents know about COVID-19 outbreaks in Memphis-area schools? They might not. – Commercial Appeal

Students across Shelby County have returned to schools this fall during local COVID-19 conditions that are expected to surpass last winter's surge. How will families and the public learn about outbreaks?

Likely, what is known about the extent of cases connected to classrooms will vary by the protocols of each school.

The county and state do not require that schools or districts publicly report any data, nor are schools required to follow uniform communication protocols with their students' families and staffers.

Politics: Tennessee legislators weigh in on mask mandates in schools

This means that after the first week of school, there will be no publicreport of active COVID-19 cases related to school buildings. Depending on the school a child attends, families and staff may not be aware of reported cases in a school unless they are identified as a close contact. Internal contact tracing and notification procedures aren't standard across school districts.

More: Tennessee education department not collecting, publicizing COVID-19 cases in schools

The consensus among local health officials and medical experts is that, last year, schools were reflections of COVID-19 cases among the community and did not drive community spread. Most school-related infections that were contact-traced were associated with extracurricular activities, most often sports.

This year, experts have voiced concern that with lesser mitigation strategies, COVID-19 could behave differently within school buildings, as a more transmissible delta variant drives infections among the unvaccinated. Children younger than 12 aren't eligible, and in Shelby County, only 20.7% of eligible kids are fully vaccinated, as of Thursday. About a third have at least one dose.

Among public school districts in Shelby County, only Collierville Schools reports COVID-19 case data on its website. Statewide, large districts including Metro Nashville Public Schools and Hamilton County Schools in Chattanooga also report their own COVID-19 case information.

Shelby County's public school districts take varying approaches to notifying parents of cases within their school buildings, according to information shared with The Commercial Appeal. All districts with the exception of Millington Municipal Schools responded to a survey about protocols.

"Families of students should be informed about the presence of the COVID case(s) in the school, but individuals should not be named," according to back-to-school guidance from Le Bonheur Children's Hospital.

Germantown Municipal School District has the most robust notification system. Close contacts of cases are notified, and families and staff receive daily case totals by school location.

Similarly, Collierville Schools notifies close contacts of cases, and publishes regular updates to its COVID-19 reporting dashboard.

Lakeland School System notifies close contacts as well as people who are in the same class or classes as a positive case.

Shelby County Schoolsnotifiesclose contacts of a case. Bartlett City Schools also notifies close contacts, and schools send out letters to parents "as needed."

In Arlington Community Schools, the district relies on the Shelby County Health Department to contact close contacts of a case. The district sends notifications to families who shared "common spaces," like classrooms, buses andextracurricular activities including sports.

With the delta variant surge, the Shelby County Health Department has a large burden of cases to trace, explained Dr. Manoj Jain, an infectious disease physician who has been advising local leaders throughout the pandemic.

Organizations, including schools, should have their own contact tracing teams that communicate with the health department, Jain said. The organizations that do, including hospitals and other employers, have been"incredibly successful in avoiding a very large outbreak."

"Contact tracing is all about communication," he said.

And time is of the essence when cases are identified, said Dr. Jason Yaun, a general pediatrician at Le Bonheur and a member of the hospital's back-to-school task force.

"If someone who should be quarantining is not and is infectious or does become infectious, they could unknowingly continue to expose other people," Yaun said. "If someone should be quarantining, they need to do so as early as possible."

Each of the responding public school districts in Shelby County said it has its own tracing team that works with the health department.

While the department is legally bound to investigating, tracing, and issuing orders forisolationand quarantine, the department "will expect and welcome the cooperation of schools and other community partners per the requirements of the current Amended Health Directive No.24," said Health Officer Bruce Randolph. "We are asking schools to assist us in identifying contacts but ultimately contact tracing is our responsibility."

Guidance bythe Centers for Disease Control and Preventionmakes an exceptionfor close contactswhen the contacts are children inside of a school: In those cases, so long as children are at least 3 feet apart from a case and properlymasking, they would not be considered contacts. The Le Bonheur guide includes this exception, which does not apply to adults.

But the Shelby County Health Department told school leaders in July that it would not be following the exception, according to an email obtained by The Commercial Appeal, and instead considers a child in a school to be the same as any close contact, which is a person within 6 feet of a case for 15 minutes or more.

It was not immediately clear how each responding districts'contact tracing teams defined close contacts within their schools.

"SCHD will also not consider the new 'K-12 Exception'listed by the CDC and TDH because the criteria for the 'K-12 Exception'is not possible to be met in most schools in Shelby County, and/or SCHD will have no way of verifying that those steps have been met," the department told schools on July 28.

While the Shelby County Health Department has said it is paying careful attention to the county's rise in pediatric COVID-19 cases, it will not report about any part schools are playing in the virus' spread.

The Tennessee Department of Education appears to nolonger accept reports from school districtsabout COVID-19 cases in their classrooms.

Tennessee parents were able to use the dashboard during the2020-21 school year amid earlier waves of the pandemicto track COVID-19 cases within their kids' school districts. The new dashboard will provide updates about how districts are spending the historic $2 billion influx of federal fundingthrough 2024 to recover amid and in the wake of the pandemic.

Related: Concern for children and COVID-19 increases as schools resume in-person learning

When the department revives its school dashboard after Labor Day, it, as of Friday,will only require school districtsto report about items related to their federal stimulus funding spending plans.

Families can find COVID-19 cases of school-aged children, 5-18, on aTennessee Department of Health dashboard. Those cases are reported by county.

"With the increasing numbers that we're seeing inchildren and the fact that children under 12 are not eligible to be vaccinated, I think (COVID-19 case data by school) is important," Yaun said. "I'm disappointed that it's not available yet ... I think it's important to have that transparency and for parents to know."

To the degreepatient privacy laws allow, school-level COVID-19 data should be available to parents, Yaun said, so they can make decisions for their children. He notedparticular importance for parents of children with special health needs and underlying conditions.

In contrast to Tennessee, Mississippi's department of health regularly reports COVID-19 cases associated with schools weekly. A recent report shows new cases and cumulative cases by staff and students, as well as total outbreaks and quarantines, reported down to the school level. In most instances, data is suppressed for values less than 5, a privacy policy the Tennessee Department of Education also adopted with its dashboard last year.

The Shelby County Health Department said it would not consider reporting clusters associated with schools as it has among nursing homes, a practice started early in the pandemic due to the high instances of death among people in nursing homes who became infected. It is rare for children who are infected to need hospitalization or die from complications, but local experts have cautioned that the number of children requiring hospitalization is increasing locally as the number of pediatric infections increases across Shelby County.

The department has not said whether state laws or policies would preclude them from publicly reporting cases associated with schools.

Asked why Shelby County could not provide information about school outbreaks, as agencies including theMississippi State Department of Healthand theSouth Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control do regularly, Shelby County Health Department Director Michelle Taylor, said while she understood concerns, "what you have to remember is that we are bound by HIPAA laws, and by different laws that govern how we collect data, and how we report it. So even though you may see different types of data coming out of Mississippi, it may also have to do with the numbers that they're seeing."

Reports about the large numbers of students quarantined or infected across Mississippicome from the state's regular reports of school cases.

"If we don't have enough numbers in certain schools to be able to record at a school level, then there's too great of a chance that an individual child or an individual family would be singled out, if we reported at that level," she continued, though it is unclear why data previously reported in suppressed figures would be a violation. "That's why you're seeing a farther out, broader level of reporting when it comes to schools. I believe the reporting is at the district level. And right now we want to keep it that way. Because we want to protect the privacy of our families as well."

Laura Testino covers education and children's issues for the Commercial Appeal. Reach her at laura.testino@commercialappeal.com or 901-512-3763. Find her on Twitter: @LDTestino

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How will parents know about COVID-19 outbreaks in Memphis-area schools? They might not. - Commercial Appeal