As Covid cases pop up in schools, no consensus in WNY on when to close

Lunch.

“The Achilles heel in school plans is lunch,” said Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University at Buffalo’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

“Masks protect you from getting infected,” Russo said. “When people eat or drink, they can’t wear their masks. Whenever your masks are down, the closer you are, the longer the period of time, the likelihood of getting infected increases.”

As of Friday, the state reported nine cases in public and private schools across Erie County, although there is a lag in the reporting. There was one case each in Clarence, Lackawanna, Sweet Home and Westminster Community Charter School; two in Amherst; and three in Orchard Park.

Among private schools, there was one reported case at Canisius High School and one at St. Mark School.

So far, there have been no Covid-19 cases reported in Niagara County schools, according to a State Health Department spokesperson.

While the numbers are still low, even one confirmed case in a school is enough to make parents uneasy about putting their children on the bus. And it again raises the question: What will it take to close a school or even an entire district?

There’s no easy answer.

The governor has said that the state will close schools when more than 9% of people in a region who are tested for Covid-19 test positive, based on a seven-day average. In Western New York, the daily rate was 1.2% on Thursday.

But local officials can close their schools at any point.

The state has left it up to the health department in each of New York’s 62 counties to determine how to proceed when a student or staff member tests positive for Covid-19. That means that responses have varied across the state.

So far, no closures have been made locally. But on Long Island, positive Covid-19 cases have prompted brief shutdowns in at least two districts and a weeklong shutdown in another.

In the Port Washington School District, officials learned on Monday that a high school student had tested positive, and so had a student at one of the elementary schools.

Officials there closed both buildings the following day, and students and staff moved to remote instruction for the day while the schools were cleaned and sanitized. On Wednesday, the schools reopened.

In Syosset, a middle school was closed on Monday after a staff member there tested positive. There, too, teachers and students moved to remote instruction for a day while the school was sanitized and Nassau County contact tracers investigated.

District officials told families that students would be considered to be under “precautionary quarantine” until the contact tracing had been completed, meaning that they should not leave their homes or interact with anyone outside their immediate family.

In Malverne High School in Nassau County, students moved to remote instruction for the entire week after someone on staff tested positive. The school is expected to resume its hybrid instruction on Monday.

“I told my parents during our parent forums in the summer that, my understanding is, one case would not close a school. That’s not a realistic expectation,” said Michael Cornell, superintendent of the Hamburg Central School District.

A common threshold

While there are no clear-cut rules regarding how many Covid-19 cases within a single school would force it to close, local school superintendents said they will consult with the Erie County Health Department as circumstances evolve.

“We have had internal questions regarding that and we haven’t pinpointed a specific criteria, beyond what’s been presented to us by the health department and the governor’s office,” said Keith Lewis, superintendent of the Lackawanna City School District. “It’s fluid and we continue to evaluate the situation.”

"Snow days are a tough call, because you don't know for sure if the weather is going to come," said Frontier Superintendent Richard Hughes. "I think the call here will be easier because we'll have real data showing who's positive, who's quarantining. It might be a building-by-building issue."

School officials should rely on information from the department of health, but they may also want to work with other superintendents around the region to come up with a common threshold for closure, said Thomas Ramming, clinical associate professor of educational leadership and policy in the University at Buffalo’s Graduate School of Education.

“Then, people aren’t saying ‘Why did they close down when our metrics are the same or worse – and we’re still open,’ ” he said.

But Ramming, a former superintendent in the Grand Island Central School District, acknowledges that can be tricky.

“You may have parents and teachers in one district saying, ‘Schools should be shut down, because the numbers are too high,’ ” Ramming said. “While in another district with the same metrics they say, ‘Let’s keep it open. It’s not that bad.’ ”

Cornell, meanwhile, reminds parents about the great length schools have taken to reopen.

“I think that should give families comfort,” said Cornell, president of the Erie-Niagara School Superintendents Association. “Based on what we’ve been told by public health professionals, these mitigation strategies, layered one on top of the other on top of the other, should go a long way in making the spread of any disease – whether it’s Covid, the flu or the common cold – very, very difficult.”

Lunchtime and mask breaks

Theoretically, Russo said, if everyone in a school is always wearing a mask, maintaining at least 6 feet of social distance and regularly washing their hands, the virus should spread very little.

But even in a best-case scenario in a school, that is not going to happen.

Lunch is one of the main reasons why, Russo said. Students, in most cases, will be eating indoors without their masks on, surrounded by other kids without their masks on, for about half an hour or so.

“When you’re indoors, even at 6 feet, all bets are off. We always get concerned with indoor settings,” he said.

The best situation is for students to eat outside, he said. If that’s not possible, it’s best to break students up into smaller groups, with each group in a different room, for lunch. For instance, it’s better to have a dozen students eating lunch in their classroom than to have them eating lunch with dozens of other students in a large cafeteria.

There are other practices that would help contain the spread of the virus during lunchtime, Russo said.

In a perfect world, it would be a good idea for students to pull their masks back up between bites of food and sips of drink, he said, to minimize the amount of time their mouths and noses are not covered.

A “dome of silence” during lunch also would help, because whenever someone talks, they are expelling more air, which makes it more likely that the virus could spread. He admits, though, that a “dome of silence” during a school lunch period is not likely to happen.

The other situation in schools he believes puts students and teachers at greater risk: mask breaks.

The State Education Department guidance to schools for reopening this fall noted that some students, especially younger ones, can find it challenging to wear face coverings all day, “so scheduling mask breaks is important.”

Russo isn’t a fan.

“I think it’s such a bad idea,” he said.

Many local schools’ reopening plans call for students to be offered several mask breaks throughout the day. Schools generally want students to be at least 6 feet apart from one another during mask breaks. And the breaks are usually limited to five minutes each.

“There’s nothing magical about five minutes,” Russo said. “It only takes a second to get infected. Even in the CDC recommendations there’s this little caveat that says if you’re in close contact and someone sneezes or coughs on you, time is irrelevant.”

He does, however, say that if mask breaks are taken outdoors, the risk is greatly reduced.