DeKalb Schools Delays In-Person Return Due To COVID-19 Case Spike

DEKALB COUNTY, GA — Citing rising coronavirus cases in Georgia, DeKalb County School District will delay in-person learning, the district announced during Monday’s school board meeting.

Superintendent Cheryl Watson-Harris said during the meeting that the district will push back in-person learning by a month, to mid-February. Classrooms were initially set to reopen Jan. 19 for students in five grade levels, despite DeKalb County’s positivity rate sitting above the 10 percent threshold — and despite at least two protests by DeKalb educators and parents, who were pushing for schools to remain in virtual learning.

A majority of staff will begin returning Feb. 3, but only if the countywide positivity rate is no higher than 10 percent, Watson-Harris said.

“Our goal remains getting our staff and our students back into our buildings as soon as that is safe to do so,” Watson-Harris said. “Our response to this pandemic has to be dynamic and we have to be flexible based on the information available to us.”

The Georgia Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 dashboard showed on Monday that DeKalb had 710 cases per 100,000 residents, and a 14.7 percent positivity rate over the last two weeks. The positivity rate in DeKalb County has remained above 10 percent for several weeks, public health data shows, which sparked the protests from educators and parents pushing for a delayed in-person reopening.

“Educators want to be with the children. They’d rather be in a school, teaching the children because teaching at home is not easy,” said Deborah Jones, president of the Organization of DeKalb Educators, in an interview with Patch Dec. 31. “DeKalb has a no-bullying policy, but they are bullying our educators.”

State Rep. Viola Davis also called on the school board to cancel in-person instruction, the representative announced in a news release Jan. 12. Davis submitted a memorandum to the board on Jan. 8, citing recent reports of a new variant of COVID-19 — which has been reported to be a more contagious strain of the virus — and requested that the board reevaluate its reopening plan.

“As elected officials, we take the safety and security of our community and children very seriously, so I believe the DeKalb County Board of Education has done the right thing by canceling in-person instruction for the time being,” Davis said in the news release. “Our constituents respect our aggressive actions to slow the spread of the coronavirus, because we value the health and well-being of our students and school staff to be of the utmost importance.”

DeKalb schools have remained virtual since last March following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, and the all-virtual school year spurred protests by parents demanding in-person learning options. At Monday’s board meeting, parents called into the meeting with mixed responses to the delayed in-person reopening.

Lisa Martin of Dunwoody said virtual learning is not working in the special education community, and another parent, Jennifer Morris, said her child’s learning has declined due to a lack of physical classroom learning; however, other parents said the district should wait until vaccinations are more widely available before reopening.

This decision from DeKalb County School District comes as two other metro Atlanta school districts delayed in-person instruction: Fulton County Schools and Cherokee County School District. As of publication Jan. 12, Atlanta Public Schools still plans to reopen Jan. 25.