Beaufort Co. schools surpass 500 staff, student COVID cases; 25 reported in a day
Beaufort County School District has reported 555 COVID-19 cases among students and staff since Sept. 28, according to its Tuesday COVID dashboard update.
Twenty-five of those cases were reported Monday, though more will likely be added to that single-day total as the week goes on due to backlogs in reporting at South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control.
DHEC reported only 34 new cases for all of Beaufort County on Monday, though officials attributed the low number to an “internal systems issue.”
Of the 25 school district cases reported Monday, six were at Hilton Head Island High School. Beaufort Middle and Bluffton High each reported four, and May River High and Mossy Oaks Elementary each reported three.
May River has reported a total of 83 COVID-19 cases, the highest in the district, followed by Bluffton High with 62 and Hilton Head Island High with 48.
The district has about 24,000 students and staff combined. About 2.3% of the district’s total student and staff population have contracted the virus since Sept. 28, up 0.4% from Thursday alone.
With 123 cases reported last week and 25 reported Monday, the past two weeks account for at least 26% of all district cases reported since Sept. 28. That also means that at least a quarter of cases reported in the district are currently “active.”
The district has a low rate of infection compared to the county at large — 5.7% of Beaufort County residents have contracted COVID-19 since March, which means the district’s infection rate is about 60% lower than the county’s.
However, the district’s infection rate is increasing much faster than the county’s. Since Jan. 4, when the district returned from winter break to full-time, in-person instruction for the first time since March, 200 new cases have been reported. That represents a 0.8% increase in the infection rate over the past eight days.
At its first meeting of 2021, Beaufort County’s school board discussed sending students back to virtual classes “as soon as possible.” A motion directing Superintendent Frank Rodriguez to do so failed 1-10, with William Smith as the lone “yes” vote.
Rodriguez has cited the district’s lower infection rate, along with the challenges of hybrid and virtual education, as a reason the district should return to face-to-face instruction.
“In schools, we have not been seeing the spread,” he said Jan. 4. “As long as it remains low within our schools, we want to provide as much face-to-face instruction as we can, because we know that’s what’s best for our students.”