Why some Stanislaus school districts stopped directly notifying parents of COVID exposures
Throughout this school year, parents have received calls or emails letting them know their child may have been exposed to COVID-19 at school. The message would at times arrive days late, due to contact tracing backlogs, but when it came, it would suggest next steps for testing and quarantine.
Now, as cases spread throughout the county and its schools in large numbers, districts in Turlock and Oakdale have stopped calling or emailing families to directly inform them of exposures.
Kamlesh Kaur, a spokeswoman for the Stanislaus County Health Services Agency, said Oakdale and Turlock are the only school districts she is aware of to use this method for notification. She wasn’t aware of Turlock Unified’s decision until The Bee asked about it.
“If that’s something they chose to do as an efficient method, then that’s truly up to them,” Kaur said.
Oakdale Joint Unified stopped calling parents about COVID-19 cases and started posting that information online on Monday, according to a post on the district’s Facebook page.
“Simply visit your school website and check your child’s teacher’s class against the list of classes posted,” the post instructs. “If your child’s teacher is on any of the classes listed, they may have been exposed to a positive COVID-19 case in that class.”
Superintendent Dave Kline said posting information online instead of making calls would free up staff to administer testing. “We needed to shift focus a little bit in order to provide as much testing as possible,” he said.
District officials encourage parents to check online for exposures every night.
On Tuesday evening, Turlock Unified School District announced it, too, would discontinue daily phone calls for exposures “in an effort to streamline communication,” according to an update on its website.
District officials will post case information daily by 6 p.m., the website said. Spokeswoman Marie Russell said the change was based on feedback from site administrators and parents.
“Now that parents are familiar with our TUSD COVID-19 notification process, we feel that encouraging them to check the School Exposures page at their discretion will be a better communication strategy to ensure that other important messages are not missed,” she wrote to The Bee by email Tuesday evening.
Russell said this was addressed at a meeting with county public health officials.
Last week, nearly 375 Turlock students and staff reported testing positive for COVID-19, with almost 300 of them students, according to the district’s weekly COVID-19 dashboard. The week prior, Jan. 8-14, the district recorded 535 cases.
California public health guidance
Earlier this month, the California Department of Public Health issued a new process for schools to follow for contact tracing. Several districts in Stanislaus County now follow a “group-tracing approach,” meaning they inform families of a positive case in a classroom rather than contact tracing to determine individual exposures.
This was supposed to allow a more swift, broad response as the omicron variant led cases to spread quickly.
The state’s guidance directs school districts to notify parents of exposure, but it doesn’t specify how that notification should occur, Kaur said. Posting the required information online counts as a notification, she said.
Schools may choose the notification system that works best for their community, Kaur said. Asked about the efficacy, from a public health standpoint, of posting exposures online as opposed to alerting people directly, Kaur said schools should use their discretion.
“It’s their community,” she said. “That school knows what’s best for them.”
