A group of Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. parents are planning a "Show Your Work — Transparency Now" protest at Monday’s night’s school board meeting after a week of concerns about COVID-19 positive cases in local schools.
BCSC released numbers on Thursday and Friday detailing the number of positive cases the school corporation has had since Aug. 10, and listed the buildings that were affected, including the administration building. The COVID-19 Community Task Force announced as part of its community spread dashboard that in-person classes would continue on Monday.
Even with that transparency, the parents said Friday they still planned to protest. The "Show Your Work – Transparency Now" protest, organized by BCSC parents Lisa Eubank and Tracy Kiser, is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Monday outside the BCSC administration building.
“This protest is really about the transparency that’s been sought from BCSC," Eubank said. "There are couple of areas in which we feel that they’re not sharing information that they should for the community. Not just the parents, but, you know, teachers, community, everyone. Because we’re all affected by COVID.”
At 6:30 p.m., the BCSC school board will hold a meeting in the Terrace Room at the administration building.
"Some members of our group may go in to attend, and a member of our group will sign up to read a statement to the board during the meeting," Eubank said. She also wrote in a post on the event’s Facebook page that some people might choose to stay outside and stream the meeting from their devices.
Kiser said organizers have reached out to local authorities and "will follow their guidelines, as well as all of the required mask and social distancing recommendations."
All who participate should "do so peacefully and follow the school board’s requirements for registering, if they wish to speak directly to the board," Kiser said.
There are no plans for speeches outside, although participants are welcome to bring signs and placards if they wish, she said.
"We want to be there to raise awareness that parents aren’t getting all the facts and to let BCSC know that we object to their lack of transparency," Kiser said.
Originally, one of Kiser and Eubank’s concerns was a lack of information regarding the number of COVID-19 cases and specific buildings with cases.
Superintendent Jim Roberts said Friday that the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. has counted eight positive cases of COVID-19 from individuals in seven of its 21 buildings — the administration building, the Busy Bees Academy Pre-K program, Columbus Signature Academy New Tech, Columbus East High School, Columbus North High School, Parkside Elementary School and W. D. Richards Elementary School. Two of these cases were from the administration building.
Of those eight, only two of the individuals would have had contact with others within the school community, Roberts said. As a result of that, nine individuals were identified as close contacts to those two individuals based on seating charts, bus charts or other information about extended periods of time the individuals may have been near them.
While Kiser and Eubank were pleased to see BCSC release more specific information about cases and hope that the school corp. will continue to do so, both women expressed a need for further transparency.
"We are still hoping for some specific information about how the move to eLearning is determined," Eubank said. "Today’s numbers continue to be at high levels for the state and for Bartholomew County. We want to understand what will cause that shift. They’ve been very vague about that and it’s important to know."
Roberts said that this remains "our most challenging question to answer."
"We have nothing that says that it would be all seven metrics or these four metrics or it’s two metrics or how many days it would be," he said. "… The most succinct answer I can give you is that with the numbers, we maintain constant communication with our local medical professionals. And we are paying specific attention to whether or not we have multiple reds for multiple days without significant qualifying information.”
Roberts said that an example of "significant qualifying information" would be an event such as a nursing home outbreak that accounts for a rise in numbers.
In the past week, there have been calls for transparency not just from parents, but also from the Columbus Educators Association and the Flat Rock-Hawcreek Teachers Association, who released a statement and petition calling for transparency in regards to BCSC’s COVID-19 metrics, which are now being managed and released by the COVID-19 Community Task Force.
“We understand the need for us to be transparent and the requests for us to be transparent," Roberts said. "The creation of the metrics was an attempt to be transparent.”
He also said that he knows of no other school corporations in the state that "put metrics out in the first place" and that the Indiana State Department of Health advised against doing so.
"They said there’s no specific way to address that," Roberts said. "You know, you throw numbers out there, people interpret them and you get all kinds of different answers.”
Roberts also said that the transfer of data management to the task force was not something BCSC saw as "a lack of transparency." He stated that the data being reported is not created by BCSC, but instead is community data that comes from sources that include the hospital, Optum test sites, the Bartholomew County Health Department and the Indiana State Department of Health.
"We, as a school corporation, were having to try to manage that data from all these sources and believed that a task force created by the community for this purpose, that was already posting data, would be a good centralized location to have that," Roberts said.
Roberts also indicated that BCSC will cooperate with the state’s plans to create a public dashboard tracking the spread of coronavirus in schools.
“I think they [the state] will be able to pull data from our local county health departments with schools attached to that and maybe publish it anyway, but if we’re asked to turn into numbers, if that’s the process or procedure that’s involved, the short answer is yes," he said.
Roberts also said that the people should also consider not just the data regarding COVID-19, but also the community’s role in slowing spread. He pointed to the 125 BCSC students and staff who have had to quarantine due to exposure to positive cases outside of the school system and its buildings.
“Our challenge will remain behavior outside of our school system," he said. "And if we don’t do things differently to make sure that, in the community, we aren’t spreading COVID-19, then it’s impossible to keep COVID-19 out of our buildings.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”If you go” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
The "Show Your Work" protest is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. Monday outside of the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. Administration Building at 1200 Central Ave.
More information is available on the event’s Facebook page, which is titled "’Show Your Work!’ A demonstration for transparency of BCSC data, decision-making and public case counts."
The event description notes, "If you like, please wear black to represent being kept in the dark. We will practice social distancing and wear masks to keep others safe."
Eubank said in a post on the event page that participants can bring signs and placards if they want. She added that participants should stay on the sidewalk and out of the street. She also recommended bringing water and chairs.
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Monday’s school board meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the Terrace Room of the administration building.
There will be a time for public comment. Individuals wishing to speak should register their name on the Blue Sheet.
One of the items on the agenda is how in-school learning is going.
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