The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District has begun releasing COVID-19 case information for individual schools. The COVID-19 data dashboard, in an effort to share more information with the public, has been updated to show how the coronavirus numbers are affecting schools. The district also will add information to the COVID-19 online dashboard if universal masking or remote instruction is instituted due to increasing COVID cases affecting that particular school.
Pegge Erkeneff, Director of Communications, Community and Government relations for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District said:
“The school district, to help share more information, will be opening up with our public portal of what kind of positive cases and close contact cases are happening in school. There’ll be a district-wide summary with a one-day count, a seven-day summary and a cumulative summary. People will be able to look at how many positives there’ve been, both in school or self-reported, and how many close contact cases have been identified through contact tracing in school or somebody saying they were identified as a close contact. That’ll be a districtwide public facing data point that updates on a daily basis. Each school is listed currently if there’s anything changing it with operations. For example, we have universal masking at some schools and then we have a hunker down at one school where that school is delivering remotely in the village. Any updates to the school statuses will be there for their operation as well as how many positive cases are happening in the school.”
As of Friday, September 3rd, there have been a total of 25 positive staff cases, 98 staff close contacts, 180 student positive cases, and 1,063 student close contacts in the cumulative summary.
The goal is to not close schools and move back into remote instruction. Erkeneff said:
“I do know there might be a classroom where both the teacher and all the students are either all close contacts or there was a positive but that can be delivered remotely with the teacher out. That is happening and then the other question about which schools would shift to universal masking, there’s different reasons for why that happens. What universal masking does is if everybody is wearing a face covering and the positive is a student, any other students that are nearby them don’t necessarily have to be in quarantine if they’re a close contact if they’re also wearing a mask, but that’s only in effect if there’s universal masking in place.”
Click here for a link to the KPBSD COVID Dashboard.
