Will CMS bring middle school students back by Thanksgiving? Here’s the latest.

With plans to bring middle school students back to classrooms just before Thanksgiving, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools leaders say they’re closely watching measures of COVID-19 spread locally — which public health data show is worsening.

The school district uses data from the Mecklenburg County Public Health Department to gauge coronavirus trends as in the red, yellow or green, with green being the lowest amount of community spread.

The number of new cases over the past week reached 136.2 per 100,000 people, chief school performance officer Kathy Elling said on Monday during a weekly update on district and county coronavirus metrics.

That figure is up from 120 in late October, when CMS leaders were preparing for the return of nearly 40,000 K-5 students. This week is the third in a row that the CMS dashboard shows the county’s overall case rate in the red zone.

Those zones are based on guidelines approved by the school district to monitor COVID-19 conditions in the county.

Meanwhile, the county’s test positivity rate has also increased to 7.2%.

The positivity rate — or the percent of coronavirus tests which come back positive —remains in the “yellow” zone of moderate community spread as defined by the district.

In Charlotte, both COVID-19 metrics have climbed in recent weeks after a period of trending down. Mecklenburg saw a peak of coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in July, when the county was adding more than 300 new cases per day on average. As of Friday, state health data showed on average of 228 lab-confirmed cases reported daily in Mecklenburg — the majority of which came from county residents.

The county’s positivity rate has been trending up since mid-October, when it hit a low point of under 5%.

CMS officials have said a move from “yellow” to “red” on the district’s dashboard does not necessarily mean there will be a change in reopening plans.

The school board will meet Tuesday evening and will consider modifications to the middle school return to in-person instruction, according to the meeting agenda. Currently, middle school students are scheduled to go back to the classroom on Nov. 23, shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday.

The board meeting can be viewed by the public on its Facebook page, where it will be streamed live starting at 6 p.m.

CMS reopening details

The district recently concluded a major phase of returning students to in-person instruction, as nearly tens of thousands of elementary school students came back to the classroom during the week of Nov. 2. So far, no clusters have been identified in CMS buildings, and district officials said it had been a largely smooth transition to bring students back.

Roughly 41,000 students are getting some form of in-person instruction as of Monday. Students in K-5 are rotating through two days of in-person instruction per week, while students with disabilities and pre-K students are in class five days a week.

About one-third of the district’s students remain in the full-remote academy, meaning they will continue with virtual instruction through the rest of the semester.

In the first week of in-person elementary instruction, 11 students were reported as positive cases in addition to 29 staff members. Chief school performance officer Kathy Elling said that most of those cases were not contracted in the school building and were reported by parents.

“We believe based on our analysis that these cases are not occurring within the school building but are coming from outside the school building and coming to school,” she said. “Our parents have done an exceptional job of keeping us up to date when they have a positive case.”

Over the past two weeks, 42 schools have reported at least one case, and 10 of those schools have two or more cases. Five schools have more than 15 people quarantined as a result of possible exposure.

In most cases, individual schools with positive cases have reported a single diagnosis among students or teachers. In five schools over the last week, officials say there’s been more than one case. As of Monday, those include Coulwood Middle, Idlewild Elementary, Lake Wylie Elementary, Sterling Elementary and Thomasboro Academy.

For a list of known cases in schools, visit CMS’ COVID-19 online dashboard.

This story was originally published November 9, 2020 at 4:12 PM.