This Midlands school district has 2,000 students out for COVID-related reasons
One week after classes started back, Lexington 1 has nearly 2,000 students out of school either because of COVID-like symptoms or in quarantine.
As of Wednesday, the school district reports 1,988 students as excluded from school as a coronavirus precaution, on top of 305 students who have confirmed diagnoses of COVID-19.
Those are the highest numbers yet reported from the Midlands area school districts.
The Lexington-based school system is updating its online COVID tracker daily during the school year, which started last week. In the same time period, 56 faculty and staff are listed as active positive cases and 102 are otherwise excluded from school.
Lexington 1 Superintendent Greg Little said it’s a stark beginning to the 2021-22 school year. Last year, the largest number of students the district had out at one time with confirmed cases of COVID-19 was 142, Little said.
”We have more than doubled our highest total by the fifth day of class,” Little said.
So far, younger children seem to be the most effected in Lexington 1. The biggest outbreak so far this year is at Centerville Elementary School in Gilbert, with 162 students in total excluded, followed by Lexington Elementary with 133. Deerfield Elementary has 112 students out.
Children under the age of 12 are not eligible to receive any of the approved COVID-19 vaccines.
Little said he could not recall a time when so many elementary schools were reporting double digit cases. He said the district would continue to encourage students and teachers to wear masks and will continue the district’s cleaning efforts in schools. Some schools have limited the number of students who can eat in the cafeteria at the same time, or have students eating in the classrooms, to try to limit opportunities for the virus to spread.
He said Lexington 1 expected higher numbers based on cases in districts that started earlier. He noted Lexington has one of the highest community transmission rates in the state, so much so that many students were already sick or in quarantine on the first day of school. He expects it will take time before administrators have an accurate idea of spread within schools.
The district is not yet considering shutting down in-person instruction, as other districts have done, and Little said that decision will depend on how much instruction is effected by the pandemic, and will be made on a case by case basis. Schools will also have e-learning “practice days” in the coming weeks.
“When we’re talking about shifting our instructional model, we want to disrupt the fewest people possible,” Little said.
Other school districts have also struggled with COVID-19 outbreaks since the beginning of the school year. When schools in nearby Kershaw County started classes earlier this month, they quickly reported more than 1,000 students were quarantined in an outbreak there. Pickens County schools went all-virtual for a week because of COVID concerns, despite protests from some parents.
Schools in South Carolina are currently prohibited from requiring students to wear masks, and the state mandates a cap on the number of students who can attend class virtually. Some districts, including neighboring Richland 1 and Richland 2, have challenged the state’s ability to limit masks.
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