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As coronavirus cases continue to surge throughout the state and country, the San Ramon Valley Unified School District has launched a “COVID Case Dashboard” to help district residents track coronavirus cases in their community.
Modeled after the online coronavirus dashboard created by Contra Costa County Health Services, the district’s dashboard tracks confirmed coronavirus cases at specific schools and offices, ensuring that community members can see when a recent case occurs in their own schools.
“Basically (the dashboard is) a summary of cases in the district by geographical location. That’s by school site and office,” assistant superintendent Danny Hillman, told DanvilleSanRamon.com. “We’re doing that instead of sending district-wide communications every time there is a positive case because it inundates people with the wrong information.”
“It’s not that we don’t want people to know there is a case, we do, but sending a district-wide communication every time there is a case on the other side of town inoculates people to the idea that they need to pay attention to it,” he added.
Available for viewing on the SRVUSD’s website, the dashboard tracks cases reported in the past 14 days, cumulative totals and the percentage of current cases reported in the past 14 days in relation to the overall school population.
As of Tuesday the percentage of cases has not yet been reported; however, Hillman said the numbers will be updated when the total number of students and staff returning for in-person instruction on Jan. 5 is known.
“Until we get the schedules determined and families are settled on their decision (if they should return to in-person or stay remote), we won’t have a divisor in there to divide the number of cases by the number of students and staff,” Hillman said.
Hillman also noted the dashboard does not track the number of students practicing remote learning who test positive for the virus — unless they attend campus for some form of in-person instruction or sporting event.
“We’re only reporting cases on (the dashboard) that are with our students or employees when those people are on our campuses. So, for example, if we had a student who is completely remote, and they are not coming back in January, they are not part of sports and they are never on our campus, we find out that they are positive, we are not going to put that on our dashboard,” he said.
While mass communications may not be sent to district residents with every confirmed case, Hillman said that individual schools will still send out communications to their own community when cases are detected.
According to the dashboard, as of Tuesday a total of 12 cases have been reported in the SRVUSD — all of which have occurred over the past two weeks.
So far, eight cases have been confirmed in Del Amigo High School, one at California High School, one at Charlotte Wood Middle School, one at Montevideo Elementary School and one at the district offices.
