COVID cases creep up in Broward schools
Nine Broward County schools employees and 11 students tested positive for the novel coronavirus over the course of the first week back to in-person learning, the district reported Friday evening.
Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County’s district the same day reported a total of 48 cases — 29 employees and 19 students — in its 392 public schools since the beginning of October.
That was a jump of 15 staffers and five students from Thursday.
In total, Broward has 60 cases. But that is because the online dashboard that keeps track of the numbers includes students and staff members who were tested starting in September, said Nadine Drew, a spokeswoman for the school district.
The Broward schools with the highest positive rates as of Friday are Indian Ridge Middle School and Nova Dwight D. Eisenhower Elementary, which each have three employees who have tested positive.
It’s not immediately clear if any of those workers are teachers.
The Broward cases so far have impacted 46 of the district’s 247 schools, according to the dashboard.
Of those, only 10 schools have students who’ve tested positive. They are: Chapel Trail Elementary; Croissant Park Elementary; Cypress Bay High; Deerfield Beach Elementary; Everglades Elementary; Liberty Elementary; Lyons Creek Middle; Seminole Middle; Welleby Elementary; and Western High.
All the schools but one, Everglades Elementary, have only one positive student case. Everglades Elementary School has two, according to the dashboard.
Eight out of the 10 schools with positive student cases also have at least one staffer who tested positive. Everglades Elementary and Deerfield Beach have only student cases.
Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, said that so far the numbers aren’t rising high enough or fast enough to give her members pause about continuing to teach their students in the classroom.
“I don’t think so. They have over 50,000 students in classes,” she said, reflecting Superintendent Robert Runcie’s projections last week that about 20 to 25% of the more than 260,000 would opt to return to face-to-face learning.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 7:19 PM.
