Should Staunton City Schools have a COVID dashboard? 2 years into pandemic they still don't.
STAUNTON — Almost two years into the COVID pandemic and Staunton City Schools still doesn't have a dashboard on its website showing positive cases in the school division. Although, according to the Virginia Department of Health, maybe that's not a concern.
Both Augusta County and Waynesboro added dashboards to their websites this academic year tracking cases reported by the school system. The two report cases by individuals schools, updating the totals daily Monday through Friday.
Neighboring school divisions in the cities of Harrisonburg and Charlottesville, and the counties of Rockingham, Rockbridge and Albemarle also have dashboards on their school websites.
Staunton, however, does not make it easy for parents to find out how many COVID cases are in schools. Staunton Superintendent Garett Smith said they had discussions with Dr. Laura Kornegay, the now retired director for the Central Shenandoah Health District, about dashboards nearly two years ago.
"Her recommendation was not to establish one," Smith said. "We still send home letters for positive cases (exposure and non-exposure) and make phone calls for contact tracing."
Laura Lee Wight, the population health manager for the Central Shenandoah Health District, said school dashboards only provide a small bit of information about how COVID is spreading in an area.
When her department works with schools, Wight said the advice is to refer back to the Virginia Department of Health dashboards on the health organization's website. On that site, information is available on overall case counts, hospitalization and death rates, and vaccination numbers by locality.
"It's important to remember that transmission is happening throughout our community," Wight said. "A lot of times individuals are exposed to COVID-19 outside of the places of work, play, learning and home. So there's multiple points of exposure for individuals, so we want people to have the most information that they can."
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She said going to the VDH dashboards provides that information because it has all cases in a community and not just a select few places.
Asked if she saw any benefit to a school-only dashboard, Wight said she would defer that question back to the school divisions.
"In the beginning, and still now, it was really critical that individuals got accurate information," Wight said. "And they got the whole data picture. The best way for us to communicate that was through our VDH dashboard instead of pointing people to different dashboards for different scenarios in their life."
The News Leader has kept a dashboard for Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County schools this year. Data for Waynesboro and Augusta County is obtained from the dashboards in those school divisions. Meanwhile. Staunton was reporting its numbers by email to The News Leader on a weekly basis, but hasn't sent a report since Friday, Dec. 10.
Patrick Hite is The News Leader's education and sports reporter. Story ideas and tips always welcome. Contact Patrick (he/him/his) at phite@newsleader.com and follow him on Twitter @Patrick_Hite. Subscribe to us at newsleader.com.
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: COVID dashboard not available in Staunton Schools 2 years into pandemic
