We come to you as concerned teachers, school staff, parents, and community members. At this time, the COVID-19 virus is spreading through our communities, with no indication of slowing down.
While we know that many schools have been able to maintain their safety mitigations and have thus far been able to avoid a large outbreak in the school, we also know that our students and staff are part of our communities where the virus is spreading rapidly. Our students and staff, kindergarten through fourth grade, who will be invited back into our school buildings five days per week on February 8th, are continuously out in the community where the virus cases are rising every single day. Even when community members are cautious and avoid gatherings, they are still frequenting grocery stores, restaurants, medical offices, pharmacies, and other places that are necessities in our daily lives.

Our schools are part of our community, and therefore, the decisions regarding when schools are safe to open, should come from monitoring the data from our community. We cannot treat them as mutually exclusive entities, as they are intertwined and each affects the other. If we want to get this virus under control, we have to make decisions that will support slowing the spread in our communities.
While we are pleased that the date was pushed back for the time being, we still feel strongly that these decisions should not be held to a numerical, day of the week standards, but instead to numerical metric standards that reflect the virus spread inside the community. 
The data in our communities, as well as the data from our healthcare facilities, especially in regards to their ability to provide quantity AND quality of care, need to be the deciding factor when it comes to schools reopening to a full capacity, Plan A type face to face model. The safety of our students, staff, and families need to be the first priority, and we can only determine if it is safe by reviewing the indicators given to us by the CDC. It is imperative that we rely on the health experts and data to guide us through this unprecedented time.
The CDC indicators and thresholds for risk of introduction and transmission of COVID-19 in schools says that the highest risk of transmission in schools occurs when the number of new cases per 100,000 persons within the last 14 days is greater than 200 and the percentage of RT-PCR tests that are positive during the last 14 days is greater than 10%.
As of January 8th, 2021, according to the NCDHHS, the metrics for Cleveland County are as follows.
Cleveland County is currently a red county under the NCDHHS’s county alert system, meaning we have critical community spread. Because no one metric provides a complete picture, the COVID-19 County Alert System uses a combination of three metrics: case rate, the percent of tests that are positive, and hospital impact within the county. The number of new cases per 100,000 persons within the last 14 days is 1,370 and the percentage of RT-PCR tests that are positive within the last 14 days is 18.3%. As of January 8th, 2021, our ICU had 0.9 available ICU beds and were at 95% ICU capacity. For reference, the state average is 83% and the National average is 77%. The NY Times states that when ICU capacity is 95% or above, “maintaining existing standards of care for the sickest patients may be difficult or impossible.”

We are not asking that schools close. In fact, this is a way we feel can keep schools open!

We are asking that we simply stay the course of Plan B until certain metrics are met. While we realize that Plan B isn’t perfect, it provides two days of face to instruction and peer interaction while continuing to meet social distancing guidelines thus providing a safe environment for students and staff.

We are asking that Cleveland County Schools use the data that the CDC and NCDHHS have identified as “core indicators” for schools to determine when it is safe to return to Plan A in-person learning. We are asking the board to look at the same three metrics case rate, the percent of tests that are positive, and hospital impact within the county and vote on this plan in order to even begin the discussion regarding moving to plan A.

We are asking that the plan include the following metric specifics:
1-the number of new cases per 100,000 persons is less than 200
2-the positivity rate is less than 10%
3-our local hospital ICU capacity should be below 85%.

Once at least two of these three metrics are met, discussions on moving to Plan A could be considered.
Many students do benefit from in-person instruction. If we all do our part, including letting data guide when we return to in-person classes, we can get students back into the classroom more quickly and safely.