Neighboring counties are keeping schools online after Christmas. Why not Beaufort Co.?
Jasper County School District is staying online-only until Jan. 20. Hampton 1 moved online on Dec. 16 with one day’s notice. Colleton County School District will spend the first two weeks after winter break in virtual classes.
But Beaufort County is still planning to return to in-person classes after winter break, making it one of two holdouts among its neighbors.
(Hampton 2 School District, which has approximately 700 students and is slated to merge with Hampton 1 by summer 2021, is currently in hybrid instruction and has not reported plans to change that, S.C. Department of Education spokesman Ryan Brown said Friday.)
Beaufort County’s schools begin winter break on Dec. 23. When students return to classes on Jan. 4, the district will begin offering five days a week of in-person classes for the first time since schools shut down in March.
“We will continue to monitor the infection rates at each campus and will quarantine individual classes, grades, and schools as appropriate,” district spokeswoman Candace Bruder said Friday.
About 69% of the district’s 21,000-plus students will attend these classes, while the rest will remain online-only.
Beaufort County reported a 126 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, the highest single-day total in the county since the pandemic began.
According to South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control, every county in the state is currently considered “high-risk” for the spread of COVID-19.
The DHEC classification system has three metrics:
Number of new cases in the past two weeks;
Whether new cases have increased, decreased or stayed level over two weeks;
Percent of positives among people tested for COVID-19 in the past two weeks.
In the weekly county risk report released Wednesday, Beaufort County had reported 500.7 new cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks, a higher rate than Colleton (276), Hampton (463) and Jasper (359.1) counties.
All four counties saw an increase in new cases. Beaufort County had a 17.5% positive testing rate, above Colleton’s (15.7%) but under Hampton’s (24%) and Jasper’s (18.8%).
However, that infection rate hasn’t carried over to schools. This week, the district surpassed 200 reported COVID-19 cases among students and staff since Sept. 28, a week before schools moved from online-only to hybrid.
There were 46 new cases reported among the district’s approximately 24,000 students and staff in the past two weeks, which translates to an infection rate about 62% lower than the county at large. The district reports cases among virtual students and staff in addition to those attending hybrid, Bruder said Saturday.
“There’s nothing like an outbreak, as I would define one, at any of the local schools in your area,” Dr. Scott Curry, an infectious disease specialist at MUSC, told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette in November.
“But schools are running at substantially less capacity... The test will be if we can get to a bad part of COVID spread among adults and see if it stays out of schools.”
Beaufort County School District will continue to require masks on campus and conduct daily temperature checks in January.
Buses will continue to run at 67% capacity or lower, and students will be given barriers at their desks when social distancing in classrooms isn’t possible.
The district will not provide rapid COVID-19 tests at schools, a state-offered plan that deputy superintendent Duke Bradley said could encourage sick students to come to school to get tested.
One of the biggest changes for the district will be an increase in students per classroom. Under hybrid instruction, most classrooms had a maximum number of students that hovered around 12, and students were kept at least six feet apart. But that could change in January, especially at schools with high in-person participation and a history of overcrowding.
“To say that every classroom is going to be six feet apart isn’t realistic, but it’ll be close,” Hilton Head Island High School principal Steve Schidrich said Thursday.
When possible, larger classes will be moved to bigger rooms like the theater or media center, Schidrich said; all students will have barriers at their desks and seating charts to help the school identify close contacts if someone tests positive.
The district will also utilize seating charts in classrooms and on buses to aid in contact tracing when people test positive for COVID-19, Bruder said.
This story was originally published December 19, 2020 at 7:00 AM.