First District 112 Staff Member Tests Positive For Coronavirus

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — A North Shore School District 112 staff member is self-isolating at home after testing positive for the coronavirus Thursday. Lake County Health Department staff have begun contact tracing aimed at notifying anyone who had close contact with the staff member who contracted the COVID-19 virus, administrators announced.

The infected staff member worked at the Green Bay School and administrative center, according to the notice. The facility was closed Friday for a deep cleaning.

"At this juncture, we should not be surprised when presumed positive or positive test results are identified within our community," the notice said. "We assume this will continue to happen, and this is a major reason why maintaining social distance, masking and hand washing are all still very important."

All staff are due to return to District 112 school buildings on Monday as the district is set to move ahead with plans for a hybrid of remote and in-person instruction next month.

There will be a self-certification process for students, employees and visitors at all district facilities, according to the district's re-opening plan. No plans for comprehensive mandatory testing of staff or students have been announced.

Families of 87 percent of students in the district have opted for in-person instruction, Superintendent Mike Lubelfeld told the board at an Aug. 18 meeting.

"We want to make sure that we are mitigating risks under this odd public health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic. We want to make sure that we're still functioning with reading, writing and arithmetic — literacy and numeracy, the fundamentals of learning," Lubelfeld said. "We also want to make sure that we provide social studies, science, physical education, health and wellness, the arts, all of the incredibly cool classes and the great opportunities that our students have."

The superintendent said measures of per capita new coronavirus infections, rising hospital admission rates and the time it takes to get results of diagnostic tests would be used as the key metrics for determining when to move between fully remote, hybrid and fully in-person instructional.

All learning must be remote if the Lake County case rate increases to 15 or more cases per 100,000 people — as measured by its rolling 7-day average — or if hospital admissions rise for more than seven of the past 10 days or it takes longer than 10 days to get a test result, according metrics presented by the superintendent.

All learning can occur in person if the rate of new cases falls below seven per 100,000 population, if hospital admissions do not increase on more than three of the past 10 days and if test results come back within three days.

Anything in between will allow for hybrid learning. Lubelfeld said the county had an incidence rate of about 12 per 100,000 as of Aug. 18, the day of the board's last meeting. He said public health officials have cleared the district to re-open under current conditions.

"The public health experts who know about this better than me have said it is safe in this range, therefore we're going in this range," he said.

Lubelfeld told board members there would be trade-offs along the way, with possible perceived or actual inadequacies in the execution of the district's re-opening plan.

"We're going to make it. We're going to do it. It's challenging when we lead in an organization that is public school and public health," he said. "It's difficult when we operate a little bit differently perhaps than others around us, yet these are the metrics, this is the science, this is our passion, these are our guiding principles."