BALTIMORE — Well the start of the year was hectic for some of the surrounding schools because of positive COVID cases, now school leaders in Baltimore City said they’re seeing a major decrease in positivity rates for students and staff.
Baltimore City Schools has finalized its COVID response division as of February. City school leaders like Cleo Hirsch who’s the Executive Director of Baltimore City Schools COVID Response Division said within the last two weeks they’ve seen the lowest positive cases all year.
“Yeah, we're seeing really trends going in the right direction in terms of the positivity rate. So we're really happy to have the additional support and the staff solely dedicated to COVID response. And we've been able to see that our testing programs, implementation has grown more and more consistent, because of the additional staffing resources and that our contact tracing times have actually been able to become much shorter, because we have dedicated staff for it,” Hirsch said.
Baltimore City school leaders said their mission is to keep kids safe and students learning in person at city schools. Also, since the beginning of the year their method of responding to COVID along with contact tracing has progressed.
“Baltimore City Public Schools has a very comprehensive COVID testing program, we do weekly asymptomatic testing for all students, and recently, we started a test to stay program,” Hirsch said.
That means if school officials learn through a parent or through contact tracing that a student was exposed to COVID they can perform a rapid test. And if the test is negative they can stay in school for the day. Over the past two weeks city schools have tested almost 100,000 people between students and staff.
Hirsch said the decrease in positive COVID numbers is why she’s urging parents to decrease their fear about sending their kids to school every day.
“So at the high school level, we're down to about .2% positivity at the elementary level about .25%. And those numbers have continued to drop every week since we returned to school in early January,” Hirsch said.
And they’re looking forward to keeping those numbers down and identifying any positive cases as early as possible while keeping students and staff safe.
“We are in a place where we have really low rates, and we have really strong mitigation strategies in place. So that should allow our young people and their families to come back into school and participate in all those amazing events that you know, is what makes school so exciting and what really builds community. So we're really looking forward to a spring in which our families, our students and our staff are able to celebrate what's been a really challenging year and to celebrate the perseverance that our community has shown,” Hirsch said.
It’s important to note that none of this would be possible without the help of parents thanks to 80% of them allowing their kids to be tested at city schools.
