ADDRESS COMMUNITY CONCERNS RELATED TO MCCSC LEARNING PHASE AND COVID-19

The Parents, Teachers, and Students for Community Safety (PTSCS) is an ad hoc group formed to address concerns around school safety due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a community coalition, PTSCS acknowledges and appreciates the efforts of the MCCSC School Board, the Metrics Committee, and the Superintendent during these difficult times.

While we are proud that MCCSC has so far managed open-campuses fairly well, COVID cases have been steadily increasing in schools. Worse, the extent and scope of a currently uncontrolled pandemic across the country and our state has become very clear in recent weeks. Sadly, Bloomington will not escape this trend. Thus, we strongly advocate for a swift transition toward a red learning phase to reduce the detrimental impact of COVID on our students, staff, and community in a way that allows some stability through the worst periods of the pandemic.

In particular, we submit the following list of concerns and request the Metrics Committee, school board and administration to consider each item carefully.

Concerns:

1. Timely decision-making is imperative.

Deep concerns exist related to the rising numbers in the surrounding counties. Through no fault of MCCSC, IU covid testing numbers, especially mitigation testing, affect MoCo metrics and skew data in ways that are not transparent to the community. It is reasonable to believe that if our data were not skewed, MCCSC would already be orange or worse on the state COVID map. The impact of IU on MoCo causes significant apprehension that there is a dangerous delay in decision-making by local entities, such as the metrics committee's work.

2. Act to protect our local health care system.
The reality is COVID is spiking in MoCo, and the surrounding counties and south-central region will be dependent on our two local hospitals. Many reports are indicating a shortage of healthcare workers to manage the COVID crisis. Many health care workers themselves are getting sick and are absent from work for extended periods of time. Communities across the state are starting to transfer COVID cases to other hospitals when they reach capacity. We know that our hospitals are needed to address the needs of this region.

Reducing student/teacher exposure in our schools will help protect frontline hospital workers who are in danger of being overburdened with high patient numbers if we don't respond now. We should not put our health care workers in the situation of having to triage who gets treatment and who does not or putting themselves and their families in danger.

3. Improve transparency around COVID Impact reporting.
-MCCSC reports .5 cases on its website. PTSCS understands that the intention behind reporting a .5 case is to communicate a case that involves individuals who travel between schools or, in some cases, only attend school part-time. This reporting is confusing and not helpful to parents or community members attempting to make sense of the district's COVID numbers. If a person is positive they are positive. A person can not be considered less positive because they are in school part-time. We request that MCCSC consider the following changes:

-Report full cases,
-Break it out reporting by staff/students/teachers,
-Include information on how the data are gathered,
-Include a total positive number,
-Add a note that the numbers in the table add up to more than the total number of cases because some cases are from people who go to multiple buildings

4. Address unsafe conditions.
There have been 11 positive Covid cases for in-person instruction at Bloomington South High School in the last six weeks. Schools such as BHSS and BHSN are particularly vulnerable because they have large student populations and have some students that travel back and forth from HHCC each day.

The issue of unmasked breakfasts, lunches, and snacks occurring in many classrooms daily is problematic and there is no clear sense of how contact tracing can be adequately implemented in the school setting due to this necessary component of the school day. This exposure risk needs to be looked at more closely and addressed transparently.

Many children are sent home from school to quarantine but do not get tested. If the 3:1 ratio of undetected Covid in the community holds up in our school situation, a school has more undetected cases within the population.

It is unclear how MCCSC is addressing the newest CDC guidelines about what constitutes a close contact. The CDC has guided schools to shift from 15 consecutive minutes when identifying close contacts to 15 cumulative. Transparency around how MCCSC is utilizing these new guidelines is warranted.

-Hoosier Hills Career Center (HHCC)
Cases at HHCC are typically reported as .5. As addressed above, this makes it difficult for the community to understand Covid rates in MCCSC.

There is a concern regarding HHCC students who get bussed in from surrounding counties that have high COVID numbers and are then in classes with students later in the day with their home school.

There is a need for increased transparency around HHCC reporting. It is unclear whether the reported COVID numbers for HHCC includes student cases from home schools outside our district.

We, the undersigned, appreciate the critical role you serve in our community. We present this list to MCCSC leadership with our best intentions and concern for our community and hope that MCCSC decision-makers will take action on the items discussed above. Thank you for taking the time to acknowledge and respond to our concerns.

Respectfully,

Parents, Teachers, and Students for Community Safety