Schools
DC Mayor Postpones Decision For Reopening Schools By 2 Weeks
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser postponed her decision of when and how District schools will reopen due to recent trends in coronavirus data.
WASHINGTON, DC — Mayor Muriel Bowser said Thursday she was delaying her decision of when and how D.C. Public Schools will reopen for the 2020-21 academic year due to recent trends in the spread of COVID-19, the illness associated with the new coronavirus.
Bowser was expected to announce her decision Thursday on when D.C. schools would reopen for the new school year. Instead, she postponed the decision until July 31, to allow the D.C. Health Department to monitor the spread of COVID-19.
"We know that the situation with this virus is changing and has been volatile," Bowser said, during a Thursday morning press conference. "This week especially we saw some trends in our data that are not ideal for making plans for the remainder of the school year."
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Overall, the COVID-19 numbers for the District have be good, according to Dr. LaQuandra S. Nesbitt, director of D.C. Health. Hospital capacity has remained under 80 percent and the positivity rate has been 3 percent or below on most days.
As the District moved toward reopening, D.C. Health expected to see new cases as more people began going out and doing activities in the community. However, recent changes in the rate of transmission and community spread of COVID-19 prompted Bowser to delay her school opening decision.
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The rate of transmission measures whether the size of the pandemic is growing by monitoring how many people are infected be each positive case. Provided the number remains below one, the pandemic will eventually disappear. For several days, the rate of transmission has been above one.
"We want to have the opportunity to monitor that to see if it will decrease and be below one as it had been for the last several weeks," Nesbitt said.
Community spread is one of the metrics D.C. Health monitors to determine when it will be safe for the District to enter the next phase of its phased reopening. In order to move forward, the District must see a sustained decrease in community spread over seven consecutive days.
In recent days, D.C. Health has identified new peaks in community spread, which has forced it to restart its count several times. For example, on Wednesday, the District had a sustained decrease of seven days. However, a new peak was identified on Thursday and the sustained decrease was reset to three days.
Even though Bowser decided to delay her decision, she and school officials presented two options currently under consideration for parents to choose from when schools reopen.
In the first option, students would be learning under a hybrid plan, in which they'd attend school for two or three days and take classes the rest of the week virtually. In the second option, all instruction would be given virtually, and students would not visit their school at all.
Bowser, however, warned that depending on where the COVID-19 indicators are on Aug. 31, when schools are scheduled to reopen, it may be decided the safest thing to do would be to start the school year with all students studying virtually. Later, DPS could move move toward offering a hybrid model of instruction as the school year progress.
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