On Wednesday, Jan. 13, the Dawson County Board of Education implemented a new way of reporting school system COVID-19 data to the local community.
Daily COVID-19 data will be published each day, via the school system’s website. Visit https://dawsoncountyschools.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=494645&pageId=13716053 to see the data.
At the Jan. 12 meeting of the Dawson County Board of Education, Superintendent Damon Gibbs told board members that the new way of releasing data will increase transparency with the public.
“There’s no mandate on how we do it or if we do it, but we’ve been sharing our Covid-19 data since the fall,” Gibbs said. “Previously we pushed out a weekly report of Covid cases and quarantines for both students and staff, but we determined that some tweaks to presentation would really be of greater value to our stakeholders.”
The new way of presenting COVID-19 data to the public will be broken up between students and staff members, and by specific schools.
The staff member data will include how many staff members are positive, which school they work at and whether they are teachers or support staff. According to Gibbs, this is so that parents can make a more informed decision on whether or not to send their children to school.
“There’s a difference between instructional staff being positive and non-instructional staff being positive,” Gibbs said. “So if the teachers have it the parents need to know that.”
The student data will be presented separately from the staff data and will also be broken down by school. The student data will be published as percentages, based off of attendance rates.
Student data will include what percentage of students were present, what percentage of students were absent due to COVID-19, and what percentage of students were absent for reasons other than COVID-19. The data will also include the total number of positive cases among the student body.
As of Thursday afternoon, the school system’s COVID-19 dashboard reported that 13 students in the system were absent due to COVID-19. The system reported that 7 staff members were absent.