Cobb school superintendent Chris Ragsdale said Thursday he does not have a specific timetable for the return to classroom learning for students in the Cobb County School District.
During a virtual Cobb Board of Education work session, he reiterated previous statements he’s made that public health metrics—and not political considerations—will determine when face-to-face instruction can begin taking place.
He was responding to questions from school board members, and said that while some of those COVID-19 indicators are declining, Cobb County still has too high of a community spread for schools to reopen safely to students and staff.
“I know people are asking for a date, and I am not going to give one,” Ragsdale said during the work session, which was being live-streamed via Zoom.
He said Cobb County’s COVID-19 case statistics and issues relating to contact tracing and efficient testing will be the key factors in a decision to let students return.
Cobb is the second-largest school district in Georgia with 112,000 students, and started in all-virtual format last week.
But he said Cobb is still in the “high community spread” category for the virus, averaging more than 300 confirmed cases per 100,000 people over the last two weeks.
While that figure has come down in recent weeks, public health officials have said that the threshold for high spread is 100 cases per 100,000. Ragsdale said his target for reopening would be in the 200 cases per 100,000 range.
Rasgdale cited figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that lists Georgia 5th nationwide among states with the most COVID-19 cases, now with more than 243,000.
That’s a distant fifth behind California, Florida, Texas and New York. Cobb’s cases per 100,000 figure is not among the highest in Georgia, but its total cases have surpassed 15,000 and the county has the second-highest death toll with 352, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Georgia’s cases spiked in July, and 60 percent of Cobb’s cases were reported in that month.
Of Cobb’s confirmed cases, a total of 1,614 have occurred among people ages 20 and under. Those numbers also have gone up dramatically since the summer began. At the start of July, that age group had 282 reported cases. By the start of August, that figure had grown to 1,078 cases.
Ragsdale said the district is juggling several sets of guidance at the state and local levels, and on Wednesday got new guidance from Georgia DPH that had some good measures and others he said “go down the path of not being able to open schools.”
Chief among them as far as Cobb schools are concerned, he said, is social distancing in the classrooms, something he said isn’t going to be possible.
He didn’t mention the subject of masks, something the district was going to encourage but not require, before Cobb schools switched to an online-only start to the school year.
When asked by board member Randy Scamihorn when the numbers would be good enough, Ragsdale said, “That’s the most difficult part of this situation. Nobody knows.”
He said he doesn’t want Cobb to get in a situation of some other metro Atlanta school districts, which opened in person and then shut down in part or altogether due to a rash of COVID-19 cases.
Ragsdale said that while the district’s protocols “are greatly improved, it’s still not where it needs to be.”
He said there will be “huge question over Labor Day” and the district’s regularly scheduled fall break to see where virus case numbers and trends are heading.
“If we can avoid a spike and keep that trend going down, we’ll be in Phase 1 sooner rather than later,” Ragsdale said.
Once a decision to return is made, K-5 and special education students will be the first to be able to come back, followed two weeks later by middle school students. Another two-week break would take place before high school students would return.
Younger and special ed students would return first, Ragsdale said, to accommodate those parents who need to get back to work.
For the first time in six months, since the COVID-19 outbreak began, the school board heard public comments before the work session.
That public comment session was not shown on the district’s livestream feed, but board chairman Brad Wheeler indicated it was being recorded and would be shown later.
More than a dozen people signed up to speak on the issue of classroom return, and there have been two rallies in recent weeks from parents demanding face-to-face instruction.
“Our situation is not what everyone wants,” Ragsdale said, pledging that Cobb schools would reopen for classroom instruction “as soon as it’s as safe as possible.”
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