Athens Clarke County Parents

Go Ahead. Vaccinate the Kids. The risk of vaccinating children will never be zero, but the alternative is so much worse.

Greetings, everyone. It's time for our weekly post on the COVID numbers in Clarke County. We hope you are holding up the best that you can.

As we all learned on Friday, CCSD announced that they are "anticipating a return to in-person instruction using a phased-in approach beginning mid-February." We've received no further information since then, though there is a principals' meeting scheduled for tonight, so we should expect further details then. (At least we would hope.) CCSD promised "more details will be provided next week," so even if no news comes out of that meeting, we presume some is coming soon. Obviously, the urgency of parents and children for information as soon as they can get it cannot be overstated.

To remind, though, the CCSD announcement said, "students will return in a hybrid model (1-2 days a week) by group (e.g., SPED adaptive, elementary, middle school, and high school)." We certainly hope that this is the FIRST step to full in-person schooling, rather than the ONLY step; 1-2 days a week is a good start, but we hope that it is just a stepping stone to five days a week as soon as the district is able to do so.

As many of you may have seen, DeKalb County became yet another county in Georgia to return to in-person learning today, February 3. There are very, very few of us left who are not back. We do hope that CCSD is monitoring all the success that these other school districts are having with their return to in-person instruction and continues to recognize how out of step this county remains among the rest of the state. We actually found DeKalb County's reopening plan refreshingly detailed and open. We hope that CCSD can work to be as transparent as well. https://www.dekalbschoolsga.org/school-reopening/

Anyway, to this week's numbers. As predicted, they went down again. They in fact went down every single day this week.

January 28 818
January 29 801
January 30 777
January 31 772
February 1 757
February 2 734
February 3 727

(To remind: The numbers here are positive cases per 100,000 residents over a rolling two-week period, the metric that Georgia DPH uses and the one that CCSD has said all along it is tracking most closely.)

Again: There is *every* reason to believe those numbers will continue to fall in the weeks ahead, particularly in the next week, when a spike day that happened 10 days ago falls off the rolling average. And, because we've continued to track neighboring Oconee County -- which opened to in-person instruction nearly a month ago and has watched their community numbers drop dramatically since then -- their number today is 518, the lowest it has been since we started tracking it in mid-December. Every piece of evidence continues to make going back to in-person learning the increasingly obvious decision.

We will update when CCSD provides more clarity on their hybrid plan, which we appreciate and still hope is just the start of the phasing-in of full-time in-person instruction.

Stay safe, everyone, and we'll back with any news that comes in.

School Re-Opening DeKalb County School District

As expected, the CCSD Board released an update today. It doesn't appear to have been sent out via email yet, but it is on their website. You can find it here: https://www.clarke.k12.ga.us/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&ModuleInstanceID=5444&ViewID=7b97f7ed-8e5e-4120-848f-a8b4987d588f&RenderLoc=0&FlexDataID=9099&PageID=1

The key points, for anyone who has not seen it yet:

*** In-person instruction appears set to begin in "mid-February."
*** For the first time, it seems that in-person instruction will be staggered, starting with 1-2 days a week. To quote: "Students will return in a hybrid model (1-2 days a week) by group (e.g., SPED adaptive, elementary, middle school, and high school)."
*** We should expect "more details next week."

We'll have more on this next week, but since the email hasn't gone out yet, it's possible many parents missed this vital information. So here it is.

Be safe out there this weekend. Best to you and your families.