JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Two weeks into the new school year in Duval County, and 12 people inside the district’s schools have tested positive for coronavirus. But that’s all the district can say.
School leaders have been blocked by the health department from sharing which schools are impacted, how many of them are teachers or students and how many are asymptomatic.
On Sunday, an attorney for the school district sent a letter to the Florida Department of Health asking for permission to publish the data, public records obtained by News4Jax show. The district is still waiting to hear back.
The district planned on releasing its own automated dashboard, which would publish counts of teachers and students at each school who tested positive. But, the plan was put on hold last week.
The Duval County Health Department told DCPS administrators they “could not publish this information within the DCPS dashboard” according to the letter sent to the Florida Department of Health.
Later, the Florida Department of Health said its data was considered “confidential” citing Florida law. Florida healthcare attorneys Ron Chapman and Ann Bittinger have dismissed claims that the law applies to schools or that releasing school counts of COVID-19 cases would violate the privacy of students or teachers.
“There is nothing in the statute that in any way prohibits DCPS from publishing the per-school COVID data,” Bittinger said.
Dr. Mohammed Reza, a Jacksonville infectious disease doctor, compares the situation going on in Florida schools to flying a plane without radar.
In Duval County schools, it’s not the school officials who are flying blind, but instead parents and teachers making decisions about their kids and their own welfare.
On Tuesday, Dr. Reza and retired physician Dr. Nancy Staats implored school board members to release the data anyway.
“I think the biggest thing we’re trying to get across is we want information available. To our parents to our, to the schools, so they can make an informed decision,” said Dr. Reza.
Dr. Staats said attempts to keep the data from being published by school districts amount to “muzzling.”
“I’m actually baffled to some degree because in terms of an argument against what I’ve heard, is a HIPPA violation or something along those lines of a privacy violation,” said Dr. Staats. “We report HIV cases and the departments of health and our entire infectious disease response and epidemiology is based upon when an outbreak of this nature exists. So, it makes absolutely no sense to withhold this data.”
DCPS Director of Communication Tracy Pierce said it’s the district’s position that it wants parents and teachers to have the data.
“We feel strongly that families need to know this information. Particularly, parents because they are making enrollment, attendance decisions based on this information,” said Pierce.
What are other districts doing?
DCPS is not the only Florida school district struggling to report the coronavirus cases in its schools.
According to a report by the Daytona Beach News-Journal, the Volusia County Department of Health is also refusing to provide information claiming it’s “confidential.”
Hillsborough County continues to report COVID-19 cases in its schools through an automated dashboard, similar to what Duval Schools is trying to produce. The district wrote “all reported cases are being shared with the public in the spirit of transparency.”
The dashboard only indicates the number of cases reported to a district administrator in Hillsborough Schools, according to a school spokesperson.
The state’s plan to publish cases in schools
While the district fights to publish cases going on in its district, the state is also working on its own report showing cases in Florida schools.
Last week, the Florida Department of Health published a document reporting hundreds of cases of COVID-19 related to schools. The Florida Department of Health communications director later said the agency “inadvertently” published it and it was a draft version.
The state quickly removed the draft and said the correct version of the data would not be released for “days or weeks.”
The draft data didn’t tell parents how many cases were at schools in a school district or how many cases were at a specific school. The cases were reported by the residence of the patients, meaning a teacher who taught in Duval County, but lived in nearby St. Johns County would be counted as a case related to the St. Johns County School District despite never setting foot inside a school in that district.
The state report was slammed by Florida Gov. Ron Desantis who said the report was “not necessarily accurate.”
During an education roundtable Monday, Desantis said he wanted to see the new report differentiate between asymptomatic and symptomatic cases. The Florida Department of Health has yet to give a date for when the report will be released.