About three weeks into the 2020-21 school year, the Kosciusko County Health Department saw 18 COVID-19 cases at local schools in August.

County Communicable Disease nurse Teresa Reed and Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert talked Wednesday at the biweekly press briefing at Warsaw City Hall about those cases and what WCS has been doing to prevent more. Reed also provided a copy of a report for county parents updating them on the pandemic for the start of the school.

Their discussion came after Public Health Officer Dr. William Remington explained the county’s high positivity rate, which was just above 12% Wednesday, according to the Indiana State Department of Health website. He attributed the high rate to the decrease of available testing in the county and positive tests being reported while not as many negative tests were.

“As we looked at the statistics and got to respond to people being very afraid of this positivity rate, and we knew what was happening here. We weren’t surprised. I didn’t anticipate it maybe as well as I wish I would have, but when we saw the numbers at the beginning of last week, I knew right away that our case jump on the state site was related to those antigen tests being” caught up, Reed said.

Before the state started counting the antigen tests, it was only counting the molecular coronavirus tests.

Reed said the county’s COVID-19 rate is not out of control and the KCHD is paying close attention to it.

Numbers

On the report to parents, she said they tried to make it so it’s easy to read. It’s in English and Spanish and was going out electronically Wednesday.

“Our rules are pretty simple: If they’re school-age in Kosciusko County, whether they attend school or not, they go into this pocket. If they are a college student in Kosciusko County, if their residence is here at the time of their illness, we’re going to put them into these numbers. And adults who are employed by the Kosciusko County public schools, and that’s just because we had to make a fine line of who was going to be in it,” she said.

The state has said that schools should be managed at the local level with help from the local health department to help maintain a safe environment.

Reed said, “The schools help us by excluding and then we get people tested, and if we find cases, then we take action to quarantine those close contacts, get them out of the pocket and make sure that if there’s going to be transmission, it’s stopped there,” Reed said.

So far, she said, no one who has been quarantined from known school cases has became a case themselves. She noted the school year was only a few weeks in.

Out of the 18 positives that occurred related to schools in August, Reed said 10 were asymptomatic; six had very mild symptoms; one was mild and one was moderate. There has been no severe case yet.

Teenagers – ages 13 to 18 – accounted for 11 of the cases, with three over the age of 19. The four younger children were not contacts at all in school but had a family member who was ill. Reed said teenagers were more prone to the virus.

As for symptoms, she said they were very general. “Just because children vomited does not mean they have COVID. When we make decisions on how much to close in a classroom or something, it can sometimes be one positive COVID case, but if we have other sick children – we don’t know why they’re sick – then we may shut down that for safety until we know what’s happening,” Reed said.

WCS

Hoffert said WCS opened its school year on Aug. 18 after a physical summer school with about 500 students involved, an outdoor graduation for the class of 2020 and the beginning of in-person sports practices and camps. “All provided insights and guidance for the opening of our buildings,” he said.

He talked about all the collaborators in formulating WCS’s reopening plans and noted parents were given two options: the traditional physical setting or distance education. Ninety-five percent of parents chose the physical setting to start off the school year.

“To put it in perspective, WCS has a projected enrollment of just over 6,800 students. We have 500 certified teachers and overall staff combined with our teachers of 1,300. We’re the third largest employer in Kosciusko County at this point. In the physical settings, we have eight elementary buildings, two middle schools, a high school, a career center and an alternative learning center. The reason I share these numbers is to represent the magnitude of WCS, our employees and just our shared number of physical locations that we have inside this greater community,” Hoffert said.

Masks are mandated inside schools by Indiana’s governor. Hoffert said students are doing “exceptional” with the masks and are coming to school masked, being “very receptive” to this and realizing this is part of the school day.

On Aug. 19, WCS learned of its first confirmed COVID case, which was at Warsaw Community High School. Protocols were followed, he said, with 10 additional students quarantined due to the confirmed close exposure. Parents were notified.

Two days later, WCS was notified of an elementary student receiving a positive COVID test result. Protocols again were followed, with four additional students quarantined and parents notified.

As of Wednesday, Hoffert said WCS has had the two positive cases and 14 quarantined students. KCHD has quarantined additional school-aged students due to COVID positives within their immediate family, but not related to WCS, he said.

“None of the quarantined students, to our immediate knowledge, as Mrs. Reed expressed, have exhibited any symptoms or tested positive at this point. All of these students have either re-entered or intend to return on time once the completion of the health department-mandated quarantine is completed. There is no indication of community transmission in WCS to this point, and we firmly believe this is due in large part to the system-wide precautionary steps and plans that have been implemented inside of our schools and through the plans that have been created,” Hoffert said.

He acknowledged that statistics indicate more positives will happen within the school system. “We will adapt as necessary,” he said.

Suicide

COVID is only one portion of students being in school physically and student safety, Hoffert said.

“Last week at the end of the week, I used the number 2 and the number 2 was that we had two positive COVID cases inside of our first two weeks of school,” he said. “But, unfortunately, during the first weekend that school was open, we also had to send out local law enforcement to two houses to do wellness checks on two students that came up as suicidical in that first weekend.”

He said it was very fortunate “we were back inside the school setting to be able to identify these through our means. And I feel in a lot of ways, we were able to save those two kids because of that factor. As we look at the whole health of students, once again COVID is just one piece of that and we don’t want to minimize that once piece, but we realize there’s a whole child we are working on as well, and a lot of that deals with social interaction.”

In January 2018, with funding from a Lilly Endowment grant, the Warsaw School Board approved for Gina Courtois as the social emotional learning coordinator for the school system. Part of Courtois’ job was to work to build and deepen a positive school climate and culture by training on how to understand and manage emotions.

Asked how important it is now to have that coordinator in place, Hoffert said it is “huge, huge.”

“It takes a community partnership. We partner with Bowen Center, we partner with a number of different organizations. What’s been learned here over the last couple of years through our Lilly Endowment grant is something that’s practiced inside of our classrooms every single day, and that’s K-12. So that can be everything from brain breaks to, again, the identifiers as we look at our QPR training for suicide prevention,” Hoffert said.

The other great attribute WCS has is its security system as students are on their 1:1 devices, he said.

“If they post something on that device that has suicidal tendencies to it, it automatically sends a phone call and a report, and those come in at all times of the day and night,” he said. “And as we talked about, some of the suicide prevention that we have is in the partnerships with our local authorities.”

Hoffert said a lot of times it happens at night or on weekends, and it’s students who are crying out for help. He said the Center for Disease Control and Prevention not only put out a lot of information about the coronavirus, but also about adolescent risks that are out there and coming because of lack of social interaction, school and normalcy.

“So those are a lot of the warning signs that we are seeing as a group and that’s why we feel like we’re getting a lot of feedback from our students that are expressing that gratitude to be back in school. That gratitude to be playing sports and do it safely. Extracurricular events that are out there,” he said.

“So that’s why a big moral imperative for our part is that, again, we’re watching out for that whole child, understanding that COVID is definitely a risk factor, but there are so many other risk factors that go into it.”

He said he was so thankful that WCS is where it’s at regarding social emotional wellness and thankful that it has invested in those areas.

“We know that this will be an area that continues to need tender care and even extra watch as we are back here,” he said.