Recently the San Bernardino City Unified School District released its COVID-19 Dashboard to the public. On its inaugural day, the dashboard reflected 360 Covid-19 cases reported throughout the district. Essentially a progress report, this tool allows you to search the number of positive COVID-19 cases currently reported at each individual school site. The dashboard also breaks down the number of staff members versus students that have tested positive for COVID.
Currently, there are 17 High Schools, 22 Middle Schools, 71 Elementary Schools, and 11 charter schools within the San Bernardino City Unified School District. On August 18th, the site went live and all 86 schools and members of the community were confronted with this front page…
Since then, the site has been paused. You now see this when you log in…
Allegedly the site is on pause for maintenance, to make corrections to the number of Covid-19 cases that were initially reported. However, we think that public outcry has played a role in the decision to put the dashboard “ON HOLD.” We are waiting to see when and if the site goes live again.
However, for the site to go live again, would be a horrible idea! This dashboard has already and will only further alarm students and families, without confronting the real needs at hand. It shows that the district blatantly knows they have mass exposure at reported sites and has done nothing to impose quarantine status for any of those sites. Furthermore, they are not providing resources or information to parents of those students exposed to COVID-19 by other teachers or students.
While the San Bernardino Unified School District is completely ignoring guidelines that require exposed students to quarantine at home, we have witnessed how other school districts have appropriately handled COVID exposure. They’ve sent students home to quarantine for 10 days to prevent additional spreading of the virus and have taken measures outside of alarming the community with a “Covid-19 Cases Dashboard.”
What do you think?
UPDATE: STILL ON HOLD