Beaufort Co. schools report 1,600+ quarantines, remove COVID case totals from website
More than 1,600 Beaufort County School District students and staff were in quarantine last week, according to an updated COVID-19 monitoring dashboard the district unveiled Monday night — but the new data is missing some key points that the district previously released, including the total number of COVID-19 infections at each school and across the district.
As of Monday, the district reported 1,543 students and between 78 and 126 staff quarantining at 31 schools between Jan. 16 and 22. Students and staff are asked to quarantine after they’re deemed “close contacts” of individuals infected with COVID-19, meaning they’ve been within six feet of them for more than 15 minutes. Close contacts have to quarantine for 14 days and cannot attend on-campus classes or events. If they’re feeling well, they attend school or teach online during quarantine.
The quarantining number includes every school in the district except for the Beaufort-Jasper Academy of Career Excellence in Ridgeland, which the district operates with Jasper County School District.
Four schools had more than 100 students quarantining:
111 at Beaufort Middle, about 22.3% of the school’s enrollment;
146 at Beaufort High, about 11.6% of the school’s enrollment;
110 at Hilton Head Island High, about 8% of the school’s enrollment;
166 at May River High, about 11.6% of the school’s enrollment.
The district will update quarantine totals every Monday showing the past week, noting the number of staff and students in quarantine at each school separately, according to its website.
Schools with fewer than five quarantines in either category will report their number as “<5.” The district will do the same with COVID-19 case counts at individual schools, showing the new infections in the past week and each day of the current week as a “<5” instead of a definite number.
The district will not report the total number of people who have been quarantined. It also has removed its cumulative totals of COVID-19 cases at each school and across the district since Sept. 28.
While only three days of data have been collected under the new method, there’s already a wide gap in how many COVID-19 cases the district could have recorded.
According to the dashboard, the district reported between 51 and 102 COVID-19 cases last week and between five and 20 cases on Monday.
That means the district has reported between 715 and 770 total COVID-19 cases among students and staff since Sept. 28. That total is based on Friday’s report, which listed 697 cumulative cases and 33 cases reported in the current week.
The COVID-19 dashboard includes infections among in-person and virtual students and staff, all of which are reported to the district by DHEC. Schools send out notifications only when an in-person employee, student or athlete tests positive for COVID-19.
After an interview with the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette, district spokesperson Candace Bruder said Tuesday that the district would provide the number of “active” COVID-19 cases — those reported in the last two-week window — across the district going forward.
From Jan. 11-24, the district has recorded 30 active cases among staff and 135 among students, she said.
Why was the data removed?
Bruder said that the removal of small-scale case and quarantine counts and the cumulative totals for schools was done to mirror the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control’s case dashboard and “in adherence with [federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] regulations.”
DHEC’s dashboard, which covers all K-12 public and private schools in the state, has been consistently slow to report infections compared to the district. As of Jan. 20, DHEC listed just 25 total infections at May River High School since it began reporting cases on Sept. 4, 2020. As of Friday, the district had reported 98 total infections at May River since Sept. 28.
HIPAA regulations were also cited as the reason the district no longer gives out details on individual quarantines regarding the classroom, sports team or grade level they originated in.
An investigation by USA Today in August showed that “those laws aren’t barriers to disclosure,” and legal experts said schools “can share information as long as they don’t identify individuals.”
Elementary and secondary schools are generally exempt from HIPAA, according to standing guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) doesn’t bar schools from releasing basic information about the number of COVID-19 cases at a school.
According to a September blog post from the U.S. Department of Education, schools can disclose the number of students who have COVID-19 to parents, students and the public at large, as long as that information “does not allow for any individual student to be identified,” and can disclose an individual student’s identity “during a health or safety emergency” when appropriate.
Bruder defended the decision to change the dashboard on Tuesday, saying that from a parent or employee’s perspective, “I don’t need to know what’s happening at the entire district as a whole. I need to go to the school where my kid is or where I work.”
“Our priority is our family members and our staff and achieving the balance between being transparent and people’s rights,” she said.