Cleveland City Schools Adds Mitigation Efforts to Stop the Spread of COVID 19

“Anytime you see the community numbers rising well that’s just something that you’re going to see in schools too. And, we need to make sure that we’re being as proactive and reactive as we can,” says Cleveland City Schools Director Dr. Russell Dyer during an interview with Mix 104.1.

Starting today, Cleveland City Schools will be taking additional measures to stop the spread of COVID 19 among rising cases.

C-C-S will take a tiered approach to monitor the spread using a list of 3 criteria.

CCS Assistant Director Dr. Jeff Elliott says, “We’re looking at student attendance, what’s our absentee rate? Is it over 10% in that school building? So, that gives us a little alert sign there and then, another question we ask is ‘Does 1% of the student enrollment at a specific school have a confirmed, active COVID 19 case?’ And the last question we ask is ‘Do we start seeing these linked cases happening? Are they happening in the classroom, a connection there?'”

If two or more of the criteria are met at a specific school, additional mitigation efforts will be made.

“The option that we’re working under right now is allowing students and encouraging students and staff please wear a mask if you want to, and I really don’t know what the difference would be between that and if our school board chose to down the road to do a mask mandate because any student can opt out based on their parent’s request of that so that’s where we are as far as a mask mandate goes,” says Director Dr. Dyer.

Dr. Dyer said during the interview that they do not plan on closing school.

Cleveland City Schools has added a COVID-19 dashboard on their website that will be updated weekly.