The Monroe County Community School Corporation moved to phase green learning status Monday. Students can now attend school in-person, five days a week for the first time since Nov. 27.
All metrics reported by the MCCSC Metrics Committee on Jan. 25 met the criteria to enter phase green, with a 3.1% positivity rate, a downward or stable trend of positive cases per day and a testing and contact tracing turnaround time of fewer than or equal to two days, according to the MCCSC website. The MCCSC Metrics Committee reports the five key metrics to MCCSC Superintendent Judith DeMuth, who decides whether it is appropriate to change phases, committee member Paul Farmer said.
Farmer felt confident in MCCSC’s ability to reopen safely and enforce social distancing, pointing out that approximately 35-40% of students opted to be fully online.
“I do not have a problem with it being green,” Farmer said. “The number of cases we're having has dropped tremendously. We're nearly back down to the exact same level we were back in the latter part of September and October and first part in November before Thanksgiving.”
However, parents such as Hopi Stosberg believe the metrics are inaccurate due to the high number of mitigation tests administered by IU. The results of IU mitigation testing should be excluded from the data used to determine whether to reopen schools, Stosberg said. Stosberg informed the school board of her concerns, but said they were unresponsive.
“It is very frustrating to me that there is this really obvious example of how our data is being skewed,” Stosberg said. “It's being completely dismissed systematically by the school system.”
According to Farmer, MCCSC recognizes that IU mitigation testing will lower positivity rates, but it is impossible to separate IU data from Indiana State Department of Health data because MCCSC does not have access to the number of daily cases recorded by the ISDH.
“It is not possible, with any high degree of certainty, to accurately remove IU’s mitigation testing data away from the Monroe County general public data,” Farmer said in an email.
Susan Diamond, whose daughter is a sophomore at Bloomington South High School, feared reopening would cause cases to spike again, reversing the current downward trend of cases in Monroe County.
Bloomington resident Robert Deppert supported his son returning to Bloomington South High School full-time, but said he is concerned for teachers’ safety. Deppert wrote to Gov. Eric Holcomb to lobby for the vaccination of teachers, and said he may plan a protest outside the Indiana Governor’s Residence.
“I think the schools need to be open, but I also think that we should be like other states and we should have gone out and vaccinated the teachers,” Deppert said.
Farmer, who serves as president of the Monroe County Education Association, also supported the vaccination of teachers.
Farmer said the choice to move to phase green was not simple, but everyone involved wants the best for students.
“A lot of our students are not getting that support when we're not in school,” Farmer said. “So, you know, there's more than just the pandemic that we have to look at and try to make decisions about what's best for students. Of course, I fight for teachers as well. But we have to look at our students too.”
