Boise School District mandated masks. Here’s how its COVID-19 numbers look so far
When the Boise School District’s board voted last month to mandate masks for students and staff, trustees said they wanted to keep the community safe and keep kids learning in person all year.
The mask mandate, board members said, would also help prevent some quarantines among students and staff who were exposed to the virus.
Now, about three weeks into the school year, the district has reported 150 positive cases of the virus.
Last week, there were 56 cases reported among students and staff, according to the district’s tracker. This week, as of Friday afternoon, there were 102 cases. Those numbers don’t include presumed positive cases. Both of those numbers exceed the number of positive cases reported by the district in any week of the second semester last school year.
The district also has had to quarantine hundreds of people. During the first week of school, 467 people were quarantined. Last week, 753 were. At some elementary schools in the district, such as Whittier and Morley Nelson, more than 50 people were quarantined last week.
Still, Dr. David Pate, former CEO of St. Luke’s Health System, said he’d expect those numbers to be worse without the mask mandate.
“The virus is different,” Dan Hollar, public affairs administrator for the school district, told the Idaho Statesman in a video interview. “We just need to be cognizant of it spreading so quickly.”
Public health officials have said the delta variant is far more contagious than what the country was dealing with last school year.
Hollar made a plea to the public, especially with the holiday weekend approaching: “Please, please, please do your best to protect yourself and mitigate the spread of the virus.”
Were these COVID-19 numbers surprising?
District officials weren’t sure what to expect in terms of caseload. The district isn’t sure how many students ages 12 to 18 have been vaccinated.
Pate said he wasn’t surprised to see those numbers of reported cases in the Boise School District.
“I wouldn’t say I saw anything terribly surprising,” he told the Idaho Statesman. “This virus that we’re dealing with now is tremendously more contagious than what we dealt with before.”
Based on what was seen over the summer, Pate said the facility infection rate — the number of people who would get the virus if one person got infected — with the delta variant and inconsistent or no masking would be expected to reach 20% to 33%.
For children younger than 12 who aren’t yet eligible for the vaccine, Pate said the best way to keep them safe is to surround them with people who are vaccinated and to have masking indoors.
“However, we know that the masks are not going to be 100% protective,” he said.
People don’t leave their masks on all the time, such as during lunch, he said, and not everyone wears their masks properly.
“All of those little temporary breaches in wearing the mask do create a risk,” Pate said. “… That’s why you don’t expect there to be no cases with the mask requirement, but I would expect it to be far worse without it.”
Mask mandates have stirred controversy in several school districts recently. After the Boise School District passed its mask mandate, it faced protests from dozens of parents who argued they should have a choice in the issue and cited low hospitalization rates for children. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has encouraged school districts to start the year with mask requirements, saying they will keep students and staff safe, especially those who are immunocompromised or are too young to get vaccinated.
Pate said he commends the Boise School District for mandating masks, but schools across Idaho can do more. He said he wished schools had taken advantage of the summer break to do more in-depth planning and look at preventative measures such as improving ventilation and air filtration, or figuring out safer ways for kids to have lunch during the day.
Why are the quarantine numbers so high?
The Boise School District’s quarantine policies are based on guidance from the CDC and Central District Health.
The policy has different requirements based on whether a person is vaccinated and whether they were masked.
According to the policy, if a person was exposed to the virus in an instructional area, but both the person infected and the person exposed were wearing a mask at the time, the contact would not need to quarantine from school or extracurricular activities if they didn’t have symptoms. That person would have to continue wearing a mask and monitoring for symptoms. The person who was infected would have to isolate.
But if a person was exposed to the virus in a non-instructional setting, such as before or after school or at extracurricular activities, then that person, if unvaccinated, would have to quarantine for seven to 14 days, depending on if they returned a negative test.
For people who are vaccinated and exposed to the virus, the policy advises they get tested at least three days after exposure, even if they don’t have symptoms, and wear a mask indoors in public. If a person isn’t vaccinated, and is exposed in a setting where they aren’t wearing a mask, they have to quarantine.
The district is also advising anyone with symptoms not to come to school.
Even though the district mandates masks, there are still several situations where contacts would have to quarantine. That could include exposures in places where students aren’t masked, such as during lunch, or in non-instructional settings that kids are together. The district also started the year with some students out in quarantine from the summer.
“We’ve had a number, if not the majority of exposures, caused from outside activities,” said Tamara Fredrickson, health services supervisor with the district. “If an exposure happens, even if kids are all masked — but let’s say it happens at a birthday party or at a daycare — then those children still have to quarantine, and so that impacts our numbers as well.”
When kids are eating lunch, the district relies on teachers and staff who can monitor students in those situations and be aware of who was in close contact with one another, she said.
“Our administrators and our school staff, our teachers, take this very seriously,” Fredrickson said.
Most of the quarantines are from exposure outside the school system, Hollar said.
“We’re not seeing spread within the school system in a major way,” he said.
Students are also counted in the quarantine numbers if they are experiencing any symptoms and awaiting COVID-19 test results. Fredrickson said the district is being extra cautious.
“We recognize that our illness procedure and following these very careful illness guidelines are what’s going to keep our schools safe and reduce the amount of spread of illness in our school communities,” she said.
This will also help the district keep students learning in person, Hollar said.
“We’re so committed to doing everything we possibly can to continue to operate in person, five days a week, for our students and our staff, to protect them,” he said. “So that’s why you see those numbers so high. It’s not an indication that they have COVID.”
What does quarantine look like for students?
When a student is home to quarantine, they will not be provided with synchronous learning, Hollar said.
“In other words, it’s not going to be following along with the individual class,” he said.
Instead, they will be able to access instructional materials through Google Classroom. They won’t be watching a live stream of their class, but most teachers use the Google platform to post materials and assignments, he said.
“That’s actually one thing that’s new since the pandemic is we do have the Google Classroom platform that students can really access all of their educational materials very easily and are very accustomed to using the Google Classroom, even when they’re in-person learning,” Fredrickson said. “It’s a very handy resource.”
The district doesn’t have enough resources to offer more formal remote learning for students who are quarantining, as teachers are already teaching full classes in person.
For students who don’t feel comfortable coming to school in person at all, the Boise Online School is the best option, Hollar said.
Will students be able to remain in person?
Last year, the Boise School District shifted its learning model several times, between fully online, hybrid and fully in-person.
The district at times didn’t have enough staff to keep schools operational because so many people had to quarantine, either for illness or exposure, Fredrickson said.
Hollar said the district is doing everything it can this year to make sure students can continue coming to school, in person, five days a week. Officials will keep looking at community case counts, the test positivity rate and other factors.
“We understand that our students best learn in person,” he said. “That’s our goal.”
But the district will also prioritize keeping students and staff safe.
“We’re not going to hesitate to make adjustments if we have to based on where we see the virus,” Hollar said.
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 10:30 AM.
