Think Out Loud

Schools assess COVID-19 mitigation tactics

By Sage Van Wing (OPB)
Sept. 30, 2021 4:49 p.m.

Broadcast: Thursday, Sept. 30

Seventy-nine schools across Oregon are currently reporting active COVID-19 outbreaks. Before the school year began, the Oregon Department of Education issued guidance to school districts on how to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus to allow students to continue with in-person learning. We talk to ODE director Colt Gill, and Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, about whether that guidance is working.

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Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: We’re going to start today with a check-in on Oregon’s K-12 schools. Students and parents and teachers and staff have had close to a month of experience with local and statewide COVID-19 protocols. There are questions about quarantine policies and the information being shared with parents. Meanwhile, the vaccination deadline for teachers and staff is looming and there is the possibility of the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students. To dig into these questions and more, I’m joined by Colt Gill, the director of the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), and Patrick Allen, the director of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). Welcome back to both of you.

Colt Gill: Thank you for having me here.

Patrick Allen: Good to be here.

Miller: Colt Gill, you have said this week that you’re reviewing the recommendations and safety protocols at the state level based on these first few weeks or months of school. What do you think could be improved?

Gill: That’s a great question. Where we’re headed is thinking about getting ready for winter in Oregon. As we get ready for winter in Oregon, we think about a couple of behaviors. People begin to come indoors and people begin to layer up to protect themselves from the cold and the rain and the wind. As we come indoors this winter, we also need to think about how COVID-19, especially the Delta variant, can spread more easily and think about how to layer up our COVID-19 protocols in our schools.

Miller: Why is winter weather a big concern in schools if for the most part students and staff have been inside the whole time. Besides maybe outside lunch or outside recess, they’re already inside.

Gill: In some schools. So we have schools in Oregon that are holding a lot of their classes outdoors. This can be in some of the smaller schools around the state. And we do also have that piece where meals being outdoors is a really great prevention protocol for the spread of COVID-19, as are other opportunities where teachers are taking their kids outside for certain classes. But we also have students spending more of their time [indoors]. Sports begin to move indoors, families begin to move indoors, all of that outside the school system also creates more opportunity for COVID-19 to spread from one person to another and come into the school setting. So our schools really need to look at two things. We are sending out a school health advisory tomorrow. That’s an update from the one we sent out earlier in September. It will ask schools to review their safe return to in-person instruction plans and consider how they can implement additional layers of protection. Things like increasing the airflow in circulation with outside air coming into the building, implementing all three COVID-19 testing programs that we have available here in Oregon, retraining staff on all the protocols, and then thinking about how to enhance the implementation of the current layers they have. For example, a lot of schools are implementing physical distancing in some ways. In order to reduce the number of students who get quarantined and then, therefore, don’t have as much access to their education, we really need them to focus in on contact tracing logs, make sure that their classrooms have seating charts, not only for their desks but in elementary school when they move to carpets. Our buses have seating charts. [They need to] have transition activities well planned so not all students are moving to the same place at the same time. And [they need to] rethink mealtime practices, especially if they’re moving from outdoors to indoors.

Miller: Do I understand that everything you’re outlining here is in the realm of recommendations. In other words, you’re saying, “Hey districts or individual schools, these are best practices. We recommend that you do these,” as opposed to, “You have to do this.”

Gill: Absolutely. Through last school year--and this is a big shift, especially last spring--all of our schools [that were] open to in-person instruction operated under almost exclusively state requirements. This year, as the governor’s executive orders changed related to COVID-19 over the summer, we have resumed, to a great extent in Oregon, local decision-making for our schools. They’re well-practiced. They have guidance from ODE and OHA. And from the CDC (Center for Disease Control). We have also provided them with a number of pieces of data that they can readily access and some decision guides to use so that they can customize their response to their local conditions. We have a couple of state requirements remaining: The face-covering requirement applies across the state of Oregon, the employee and volunteer vaccination requirement applies across the state of Oregon, and the requirement that they share their safe return to in-person instruction plan with their community so that all the parents and families can see what their school is doing to protect students from COVID-19 and from being quarantined because they become a close contact.

Miller: One of the protocols you mentioned has to do with testing and Patrick Allen, I think this is closer to the Oregon Health Authority piece of this, so I want to turn to you. Last year, Utah implemented a so-called “Test to Stay” program. It meant that instead of quarantining for more than a week, if they were potentially exposed to COVID-19, students could come back if they got negative test results. A CDC study found that that policy saved over 100,000 student days of in-person instruction last year. Oregon so far has decided against implementing a system like that. Why?

Allen: What we’ve done is line up with what the CDC has continued to recommend,

which is not a “Test to Stay” policy. It’s a little bit more of a hybrid that allows, at local public health discretion, the ability to test out of quarantine sooner. We’re looking at how many local public health departments have actually adopted that standard and may make some changes there because we think it could be used more, but we’re trying to stay fairly close to CDC standards.

Miller: Where does the voluntary COVID-19 screening program for districts stand right now?

Allen: We have that in place in, I believe, 51 districts across the state, including most, if not all of the 10 largest districts. We continue to onboard further districts every week.

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Miller: If I understand correctly though, if there are resources available for voluntary testing--say for a club or a whole school to be tested once a week--why couldn’t it be standard protocol statewide? If students in a classroom are potentially exposed to somebody who has tested positive, then [could they] all, as a matter of course, be offered tests through the school?

Allen: If kids are [exposed] that’s a diagnostic program which is different [from] the screening program, and that’s in place in about 1,000 schools across the state. And if kids are potentially exposed or symptomatic then they are able to get a diagnostic test through that program, if the school is participating.

Miller: You’re saying 1,000 individual schools--do you have a sense for what that means in terms of the percentage of schools in the state that are currently offering those diagnostic tests as a matter of course?

Allen: I don’t [have that information] in terms of percentage of schools. It is my understanding that it represents a relatively large percentage of actual students in the state.

Miller: Colt, I have to say that I’ve heard from many parents in the Portland area and I’ve seen reports that they’ve gotten an email saying, “Somebody in the school tested positive. We will alert you if you have a close contact,” and then, for the most part, people are not getting those second emails. This has led a lot of parents to say that they feel like they’re not getting all the information that they want about, for example, how close the contact was. So they are not necessarily able to assess for themselves the level of risk that their kids were exposed to. This gets to the kind and amount of information that districts are choosing to share with parents. What are the state guidelines for how much information districts have to share?

Gill: First, I would say that that’s good news, that they’re getting the first message means that they’re following the guidelines. So we do have a COVID-19 planning document that goes out to all schools and local public health authorities that they both use that covers a variety of COVID-19 scenarios in schools. In that, there are templates for exactly that email or that message that goes out to families that lets everyone know that we did have a case in our school and that we are doing the contact tracing and will connect with you if you are a close contact. That is to make sure that everybody in the school knows that both the district and the local public health authority are aware. People tend to see things on social media and get concerned. Both the local public health authority and the school are required to maintain confidentiality for the people that are involved; the people who have COVID-19, and those that are close contacts. Those will all be individual contacts. The better that our schools get at all the health and safety protocols, the fewer students that will get caught up in a quarantine because it won’t be an entire school bus, for example. Now that our school districts are underway and [they understand] the impacts of close contacts, they’re paying attention to having seating charts on school buses. It will be the six or seven students that surround another student on that bus and the four or five students in a classroom, [not] a whole classroom or a whole school bus. There will be fewer opportunities for people to get that second follow-up message to say that your child was a close contact.

Miller: This connects the thread that we were having with Patrick Allen about who might get the diagnostic testing with the question of notification. If parents would want to get a test,

just prophylactically or out of an abundance of caution, if they knew that a student tested positive in their kid’s classroom. But if they’re not being told that somebody tested positive in their classroom, then where does that leave them?

Gill: Families can contact their school and ask some of those questions. They can first ask their classroom teacher [in] their elementary school or call the school administration to understand more about their own child’s contact or they’re level of contact with anyone with COVID-19. That school is still not going to say, “The person who had COVID-19 was in room X.” But they will be able to tell that family that no one with COVID-19 to our knowledge has been in your child’s classroom. They can clarify that information for them. Each of the schools do have access to the diagnostic testing that Pat referred to and they can provide a test to students and staff members who are either symptomatic or who have been a close contact. That’s available there if needed. If a family was concerned because there was a COVID-19 case in their classroom or on their bus, I’m sure that the school can accommodate them with one of those tests.

Miller: Patrick Allen, as I’m sure you know, different districts across the country are handling all these questions in different ways. In LA, they test basically all students regularly as one tool in the toolbox of getting a picture, in this case, an asymptomatic picture, of how prevalent the virus is. Is something like that possible at the statewide level? Are there enough testing resources to make something like that a reality?

Allen: There really aren’t [enough testing resources] on a statewide basis. And there’s been a pretty vigorous debate in the scientific community about the value of asymptomatic testing [producing] high rates of false positives [and] high rates of false negatives. We have tended to come down more on the side that massive asymptomatic testing is not very useful in these kinds of circumstances. As I said at the beginning, the simple answer is we don’t have enough resources to test 500,000 kids and several tens of thousands of staff multiple times a week or weekly and really have tried to focus [efforts] on higher risk environments and places where there is potential exposure or symptoms.

Miller: Colt Gill, Oregon’s K-12 employees have until October 18th, so two and a half weeks or so, to be fully vaccinated. At Portland Public schools, 87% of staff have reported their vaccination status and of those, 95% are fully vaccinated. Do you have a sense right now for the statewide numbers?

Gill: We don’t really have a sense [of the numbers] statewide. I have heard from many districts. I think most districts feel like they’re on track. We do have some districts that are still working with staff to overcome potential staffing challenges that they may see later in October due to staff that either aren’t verifying or are asking for an exception.

Miller: When you say challenges, how serious is the situation that you’re hearing from superintendents or leaders in various districts?

Gill: I think part of this is that we need to wait and see what those challenges are and I think that we need to remember the critical challenge that we have in staffing schools now. We had, in some areas, staffing challenges prior to the pandemic. During the pandemic, our school administrators and district administrators have been doing tremendous work making sure that their schools can operate day in and day out because they are consistently having staff members quarantine. We can’t go further into the school year successfully without having staff vaccinated. When staff are vaccinated they don’t quarantine unless they have symptoms. They’re also, of course, protecting themselves from getting COVID-19 and even more so from getting a severe case of COVID-19. They’re also protecting the students and staff around them, some of whom are more vulnerable to COVID-19, and some of whom have family members that they may not be aware of that are more vulnerable to COVID-19. This vaccination is clearly something that’s important for the individual, and self-care is an individual choice. But what we really need to think about as Oregonians in our state is how we’re being good neighbors to those around us to make sure that we’re getting vaccinated to protect our family, our friends, and those that were working and playing around, and their families as well. This will also help to free up our hospitals for individuals, other neighbors in our communities, who are having more serious ailments or accidents that need to be tended to in our hospitals.

Miller: Patrick Allen, right now, individual districts are talking about the possibility of a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students. Just to put this in perspective, vaccine mandates are common for Oregon students. By the time a student reaches seventh grade, they need to have received one dose each of the chickenpox (varicella) and Tdap vaccines, two of MMR and hepatitis A, three of hepatitis B, four of polio, and five doses of the Diphtheria, Tetanus and Pertussis (DTaP) vaccine. What do you think about a statewide requirement, maybe starting with [age] 16 and up, and then going down over time for a COVID-19 vaccine?

Allen: There’s a process laid out in state statute for how we approach making a vaccine required for school attendance and it starts with a vaccine advisory committee that we maintain at the state level. We would [also] look for the advisory committee on immunization practices at CDC. It’s really unlikely that either of those committees would recommend a vaccine become a required vaccine until they have received full FDA approval for the ages in question, particularly when you think right now about kids [ages] 5 to 12 who are not eligible for vaccines. Pfizer has submitted data for emergency use approval and there’s some expectation that that may occur relatively soon, but I think we’re a long way away from full approval for vaccines for kids. I have a hard time imagining that we would make those required vaccines before that occurred.

Miller: Patrick Allen and Colt Gill, thanks for your time today.

Gill: Thank you for the opportunity.

Allen: Happy to be here.

Miller: Patrick Allen is the director of the Oregon Health Authority. Colt Gill is the director of the Oregon Department of Education.

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