COVID-19 rumors don’t match school numbers

Published 4:58 pm Tuesday, November 10, 2020

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By Neil B. McGahee

Managing Editor

Rumors abound on the internet about entire classrooms at Crisp County Primary School being “shut down” by COVID-19, the infectious disease caused by exposure to a coronavirus.

“They are simply overblown,” said Crisp County Superintendent of Schools Cindy Hughes. “As our weekly COVID report indicated last Friday, November 6, we had a total of two positive students and three employees identified as positive.

“I have heard claims of as many as four classrooms at Crisp Primary School being quarantined. But the truth is, two students tested positive — a student at the primary school and one at the high school — so we put that primary class in quarantine. We follow the Department of Public Health guidelines. When a student or a staff member tests positive for exposure to COVID-19, they are sent home and they can’t come back to school for 14 days.”
But she said it’s not like they are just sitting at home doing nothing,

“They switch over to virtual learning, often taught by their own teacher,” Hughes said. “The teacher is quarantined just like the students so they often teach from their home.”

“Through today, November 10, we have identified two additional positive students at the primary school, but the primary school has 815 face-to-face students and 149 employees so you can see this number is still a very low percentage of the total population on the CCPS campus. We will post a final summary for this week on Friday, per our normal reporting.  The total number of students and employees for the system is listed on our weekly report.”