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Starting Monday, the Henrico County Public Schools division will post a weekly update of school-related COVID-19 cases and move away from posting daily updates.
The charts were temporarily removed from the HCPS website Tuesday, when the school health services department began an audit of the data. The public charts will remain offline until school officials can ensure that the correct data is available.
The school division in early September moved contact-tracing responsibilities to the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts, and the data is still lagging as the transition is completed. The school division is able to utilize the RHHD's 20 contact tracers, who also service contact tracing needs across Richmond and Henrico. Additionally, HCPS employs two contact tracers, and there are two open contact trace positions that should soon be filled.
“In some cases, families know about cases through word of mouth or through the contact-tracing process, but until that process is complete, it isn’t added to the dashboard,” said Robin Gilbert, HCPS’ supervisor of school health services.
HCPS will be the largest school division in the state that updates cases on its public website weekly instead of daily.
Neighboring Chesterfield County Public Schools (60,904 enrollment), Richmond Public Schools (28,240 enrollment) and Hopewell City Public Schools (enrollment 4,245) update cases daily.
School divisions in the local area that report weekly are small districts, including Goochland County Public Schools (enrollment 2,582), Powhatan County Public Schools (4,212 enrollment), New Kent County Public Schools (enrollment 3,040) and Hanover County Public Schools (16,519 enrollment).
(All enrollment data is according to 2020-2021 enrollment counts from the Virginia Department of Education. Enrollment data for the current academic year has not yet been released by the VDOE.)
School divisions are under no legal obligation to communicate school-related COVID-19 cases to the public. However, the VDOE suggests reporting cases on division websites.
“Regular updates following an initial notification would be expected, whether or not additional cases are identified,” reads guidance from the VDH provided to the Citizen. “The frequency of notifications may depend on how a situation is evolving. For example, it might be that notices would be sent out for the first several cases individually, but then cases could be grouped into situation updates, or posted on an internal school webpage accessible to parents and staff, if the frequency of occurrence of new cases increases rapidly.”
As employers, school divisions are subject to state labor and industry regulations. They are obligated to notify the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry and the VDH when there are two or more employees at the workplace who test positive for the virus within a two-week period.
Henrico’s move to update the charts on Mondays to reflect the previous week’s information aims to “establish a more orderly flow of information,” Gilbert said.
Emails from principals notifying families of COVID-19 cases in their schools also will move to a weekly schedule.
Editor's note: This story was updated Sept. 23 to reflect the correct number of RHHD contact trace positions based on updated information. This story was updated Sept. 28 to include more information about duties of contact tracers.
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Anna Bryson is the Henrico Citizen's education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar.
