COVID-19 cases in Copperas Cove ISD rise to 120 as of Tuesday
By BRITTANY FHOLER
Cove Leader-Press
The Copperas Cove Independent School District is reporting 120 cases of lab-confirmed COVID-19 as of Tuesday, with 24 staff and 96 students testing positive as of Tuesday, CCISD Superintendent Joseph Burns told the board of Tuesday evening.
“That number has risen steadily since last week when they started tracking them,” Burns said.
Compared to the 2020-2021 school year, that year saw a total of 259 cases among students and 150 staff.
CCISD has brought back its COVID-19 case count dashboard and will be updating its dashboard weekly. The CCISD COVID dashboard can be found at https://www.ccisd.com/322681_2.
Burns said school districts are no longer required to put a dashboard up for COVID positive cases or COVID cases/exposures, and TEA has told districts that they are not supposed to contact trace, and that it is the function of the Department of State Health Services.
Additionally, the state eliminated funding for COVID-19 contact tracing through the Texas Department of State Health Services, as of September 1, and thus the state will no longer be contact tracing.
CCISD starts on-campus COVID-19 testing
The district will be using Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds left over from the summer to hire a nurse’s aide for each campus to help with providing rapid COVID-19 tests to students and staff, onsite.
“It is not for the community,” Burns said. “It’s only for students and for our staff, but we’re having a huge challenge right now with staff who are saying, ‘Hey, I’m COVID positive,’ and we say, ‘Well, do you have your lab test?’ ‘No, I don’t have a lab test because I can’t get in to see the doctor.’”
With the increase in people using at-home COVID tests from local pharmacies, there is concern over whether they are swabbing themselves, Burns said.
“One of the things we’ve said is we’re going to take up the task of trying to make sure we can verify that the person who claims to have COVID or been exposed is actually the person we have a test on,” Burns said.
The testing program uses BinaxNOW tests, which provide results in 15 minutes and are administered using a nasal swab in the front area of the nostril. According to documentation released to parents, the tests have been shown to be highly accurate, with accuracy rates of 97-98% for symptomatic individuals.
CCISD will test any staff or student (with parent permission) who is experiencing symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Testing will be conducted in the nurse’s office on each campus. Parents will complete a Student Consent Form Skyward Family Access as an online form and must be completed before a student can be tested.
If a parent has given permission for the testing, the child’s school will call to inform them that the student is experiencing symptoms and that they will be administering a BinaxNOW test. The test administrator will also call to share the results after the test has been administered. Additionally, the student’s parent or guardian will receive test results via text within 20 minutes and will also receive a confirmation email within 24 hours.
For those whose students are experiencing symptoms at home and they would like to have their student tested, parents should contact the campus nurse and make an appointment to come to the campus to be tested. Testing will be conducted curbside.
No face covering requirement in the district
CCISD does not have a face covering requirement, but Burns has sent out emails encouraging students and staff to be mindful of their personal health and make the decisions best for them regarding vaccines and masks.
Burns called mandating masks in defiance of the governor’s Executive Order “unpaved ground.”
“I have visited with two of our three law firms —waiting on a call back from the other one — and both of them say, ‘Hey, it’s a chance you take, and you have to decide what you want to do,’” Burns said. “Our kids are doing a pretty good job right now.”
Burns said that from his visits throughout the district, he has seen around 70 percent of students wearing masks and approximately half of staff wearing masks.
District working on parameters for campus closures, no waivers for missed days
Burns said that the district will be working on coming up with a metric for when to close a campus based on how many staff are quarantining.
Across the state, school districts have shuttered individual campuses as well as whole districts due to COVID-19 cases. Connally ISD closed its entire five campus district for the week after second teacher passed away to COVID-19. That district had only reported 51 cases since school started.
School districts face a challenge with TEA not granting any waivers for missed days due to COVID for school districts, according to Burns.
“So, if you miss for COVID, you’re going to have to take the number of minutes you miss that day and add on to the school days for the rest of the year, and the challenge we’re going to face is it’s going to be campus by campus, so you may end up having a campus that has to run to 4 p.m. to be able to catch up on the minutes because they pay you based on minutes now,” Burns said.
TEA is also not providing funding to school districts for virtual learning, Burns added.
They will provide funds for something called “Remote Conferencing” which will cover a certain number of hours of direct instruction from a teacher, depending on grade level. The rules stipulate that this cannot be a teacher teaching an entire class of students at once. This can only be done for 20 cumulative days for the school year.
TEA does allow for Homebound Instruction, but this is not expected to apply to someone who at home with COVID-19.
Burns also mentioned S.B. 15, which is currently awaiting the signature of Speaker of the House Dade Phelan in the Texas House of Representatives. The bill would grant districts the ability to offer virtual learning to students who have a grade average of a “C” or better, who passed the STAAR tests and who had a 90 percent attendance rate during the year before. The bill would also cap districts to offering these courses to only 10 percent of the student population.
“When we look back on virtual learning last year, that was our most unsuccessful method of providing instruction to kids,” Burns said. He referred to providing virtual learning as “an open door to Pandora’s Box.”