District 113 COVID-19 Cases Contracted Outside School: Officials

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — Public health officials believe nearly two dozen recent coronavirus infections among Deerfield and Highland Park high school students originated outside of school buildings, board members were told this week.

Superintendent Bruce Law said he and other administrators met Monday with Lake County Health Department staff to discuss the recent positive test results, which have led to at least 117 people being quarantined.

"They just wanted to meet after last week's challenges, and one of the things they said is that, to their knowledge, the source of our cases was outside activities. It was not inside the schools," Law said, emphasizing that what happens outside the school has an effect on what happens inside it.

"We know that everyone is tired of the pandemic, and you want to move on," the superintendent said. "But now is really the time to be vigilant and maintain the mitigations inside school, which we will do, but also outside of school, so that we can continue to do the things that we want to do."

Township High School District 113 Board President Jodi Shapira said the district can only control what goes on at school, so help from the community is necessary. She said she was herself staying home due to recent interstate travel and asked others to do the same.

"We worked really hard to get this hybrid going. There's a lot of kids — we are hearing about it all the time — that are really needing it and benefiting from it," Shapira said. "You hate to hear about the kid who now has to socially isolate for no cause of their own."

Board member Dan Struck pointed to the rippling effects of contact tracing once students test positive.

"That means that every other student with whom those students came into contact has to undergo some form of isolation and quarantine. It's so important for everybody to do their best at acting safely and practicing personal mitigation by wearing a mask, keeping distance, not gathering inside for parties," Struck said. "If that isn't done, everything we're doing within the district, unfortunately, has the potential to be wasted."

As of Monday's board committee meeting, there were 22 positive cases among students in the district — 19 at Deerfield High School and four at Highland Park High School. District officials notified families the day after the meeting of an additional DHS student who testing positive.

A District 113 COVID-19 dashboard made public after Monday's meeting shows the number of coronavirus infections among students and staff at Deerfield and Highland Park high schools, as well as how many of them have been detected by the district's new mandatory saliva testing program, which picked up at least seven of the positive cases.

The online dashboard will be updated every two weeks, according to district officials.

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The superintendent also announced that there would be a brief window next week for families who have so far opted for fully remote instruction to enroll in the district's hybrid program. The window for switching will be open Monday through Wednesday, Law said. Students must have consented to the saliva testing program to be allowed back on campus as soon as April 6, the week after spring break.

"Due to the time it takes to place students into cohorts and rebalance bus routes as well as all the complexity of scheduling SHIELD testing, this is the only window we're going to be opening for fourth quarter for remote learning students to move into the in-person rotation for fourth quarter," Law said. "This is it."

The meeting also addressed the four-day vaccination clinic for employees of North Shore School District 112, Township High School District 113, Zion-Benton Township High School District 126, Beach Park Community Consolidated School District 3, Zion Elementary School District 6, Bannockburn School District 106 and North Chicago School District 187.

A total of 6,254 doses of vaccine were administered to staff members at the eight Lake County districts. Law said fellow administrators will one day look back with pride on their work facilitating the clinic.

"There's been not too many bright spots in this pandemic, but watching that and all the people who came through, and knowing the impact that was going to have on their school community, it was really good," he said. "District 113 should be very, very proud of our role in that."