Local schools online for now

SANTA FE — Public schools in Curry and Roosevelt counties will remain in online-only mode through at least next week.

While most schools around the state will reopen to students this week, recent coronavirus cases in the Clovis and Portales area are too high to meet state standards for re-entry.

Public Education Secretary Ryan Stewart had a media availability Thursday, where he and Human Services Secretary David Scrase addressed some of the key components as schools look to go back to in-person classes for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began in March.

The state had already delayed in-person schooling until after the Labor Day weekend due to high COVID-19 positive tests throughout the state in July, but Stewart thanked New Mexicans for following social distancing and COVID-safe protocols to get positive tests down and allow re-entry plans to take place.

For a school district to be cleared for re-entry, two conditions must be met:

• Its home county must be in the “green zone,” defined as having less than eight new positive cases per 100,000 residents and test positivity rate at or below 5%. Both criteria are calculated on 14-day rolling averages.

Scrase said previous measures have included seven-day averages, but increasing the sample size helps counties and school districts avoid uncertainty over how much one day could shift numbers.

“The 14 days is to stabilize this,” Scrase said. “We really want to get counties in the green, open schools and keep them open. We do want to work with the leadership in each county to get the word out … on what to do to get your county back into the green.”

• A school district must have a re-entry plan approved by the Public Education Department.

“Flexibility is going to have to be the name of the game,” Stewart said, noting that a plan must have considerations for social distancing, cleaning protocols and remote-only options for students and staffers who have concerns.

The only local county in the green is De Baca, which has not had a COVID-19 positive test. The Fort Sumner school district, Stewart said, also has an approved re-entry plan in place.

Of New Mexico's 33 counties, 25 of them are in the green zone.

The state has three other designations for counties:

• Orange: Average daily cases under eight per 100,000 residents, but test positivity 5% or greater. Dona Ana County is the only county in this designation.

• Yellow: More than eight daily new cases per 100,000 residents, with test positivity at or below 5%. Curry and McKinley are the only two counties in this designation. As of Friday, Curry was listed at 10.4 daily cases per 100,000 and 4.4% test positivity.

• Red: More than eight daily new cases per 100,000 residents, with test positivity at 5% or greater. These counties include Roosevelt, Quay, Chaves, Lea, Eddy, Hidalgo and Luna. As of Friday, Roosevelt was listed at 10.0 daily cases per 100,000 and 7.0% test positivity.

Stewart anticipates instances where a county is meeting one metric and extremely close on another, and said the state can't just say a county is close enough.

“The line is the line,” Stewart said, “and we have to be consistent.”

Scrase said the state does expect there will be infection spikes throughout the state over the next few months, and there may be some closures of classrooms or schools during the school year.

Should a district have to close due to COVID-19 cases, Scrase said, the factors will be pretty evident to the community before that decision is made.

“We owe it to our kids to do this right the first time,” Scrase said Wednesday's webinar. “Once we get them back, we want to keep them there. We will have cases. We will have to close schools. I really hope we don't have a district (closure).”

There were three different closure scenarios noted during a Thursday presentation, with each including a temporary move to remote learning:

• Cases limited to an individual class: The classroom would be closed for cleaning, plus students and staff in the classroom and close contacts should be tested and quarantined for 14 days.

• Cases limited to a building wing: The rooms in the wing would be closed for cleaning, plus students and staff in the impacted rooms and close contacts should be tested and quarantined for 14 days.

• Cases across a building: The building would be closed for cleaning, plus students and staff in the impacted rooms and close contacts should be tested and quarantined for 14 days.

“We're taking a very deliberate approach to this,” Stewart said. “We don't want to see the issues that have happened elsewhere. We've done a lot to strengthen the online programs, make them more robust, but we realize many kids need to be in those buildings. Educators need to be in those buildings.”

For people who are updating daily case counts on their own spreadsheet, Scrase noted an important data collection difference.

When the state gives a daily update on new cases each afternoon, cases are announced based on when the state receives the test.

When the state calculates for a state's color designation, positives are reclassified to the day the test was taken. This procedure, Scrase said, eliminates the variable of turnaround times from the different labs the state employs.

Further information on county data is available at cv.nmhealth.orgunder the “Data Dashboard” option, and more information on school re-entry will be posted at https://bit.ly/BackToSchoolNM (Editor's note: The URL is case-sensitive).