OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — Like a lot of teachers in the middle of a pandemic, Alisha Morris is anxious. Worried not only for students and teachers in her own district, which starts class next week, but for schools across the country.
So from her apartment in Johnson County, the Olathe West theater teacher began searching online for news stories about COVID-19 cases in schools.
What she discovered was depressing — and ultimately grabbed national headlines. In that first week alone in early August, she found about 330 schools across the country dealing with COVID-19. She also heard from teachers who fear the unknowns about what’s going to happen when they go back to their classrooms and whether enough people will be told about COVID-19 cases in schools, The Kansas City Star reports.
“There were only three or four states that were even having school and there were already cases, which is why the information was so shocking in the first place,” said Morris.
She plotted the information on a spreadsheet and shared her unique tracker on her personal Facebook page and a page for Kansas teachers. The data quickly made the rounds on other Facebook pages for teachers around the country, and people volunteered to help her track cases, which ran into the thousands.
The crowd-sourced effort drew attention from the national media, including The Washington Post, Good Morning America and NPR.
“I’ve always been kind of a spreadsheet nerd,” Morris told the Kansas National Education Association, which also featured her on its website. “I thought it would be a productive use of my time, waiting for school to start.”
The national NEA took notice, too, and last week the union took over the project, calling it a “snapshot of coronavirus outbreaks” in U.S. public schools, kindergarten through 12th grade.
It lists confirmed and suspected cases of COVID-19, and deaths state by state, with a goal of protecting “educators, students, and their families from unsafe reopening policies,” the NEA website says.
“I just wanted to see what patterns I could find because I had already seen high schools were reporting a lot of cases,” said Morris, who was happy to hand off the labor-intensive project.
As she read hundreds of news stories about COVID-19 and schools, she saw that as the medical experts have warned from the beginning, COVID-19 is indiscriminate, though clearly there were more cases reported in high schools than grade schools.
Studies show younger kids are less likely to get COVID-19 than older students, one reason many districts are letting grade schoolers return to classrooms. The data shows younger children are not driving the pandemic.
Morris found cases of the virus infecting “student athletes, teachers there for pre-service, custodians — quite a few — administrators, superintendents, food workers, and transportation drivers, like bus drivers,” before most districts had even opened, she said.
“Through my findings, and please note, this is all speculation. I don’t have any hard facts or percentages in mind, but the one thing that became clear is that no age group is immune to this,” she said. “I logged cases at almost every grade level. I remember specifically, a second-grade class where a second-grader tested positive and the whole class had to quarantine.
“I will say there have been significantly more cases in the high school area. And I’ve seen a lot come through sports teams.”
