City schools offer COVID-19 update

Published 5:30 am Saturday, September 26, 2020

Schools returned from summer a little more than a month ago, and students and teachers have faced new challenges as they navigate the new guidelines and procedures meant to limit the spread of COVID-19.

To give an update on how their schools have faced those challenges and how COVID-19 has affected students and staff, the five principals in the Cullman City School System made presentations to the Cullman City School Board during a board work session Friday morning. 

Cullman City Primary School

Cullman City Primary School Principal Tricia Culpepper said the school has had two students who tested positive for COVID-19 and three staff members test positive since the beginning of the school year. 

Culpepper said there have been 122 students and 14 staff members who have had to quarantine due to exposure to a student that either tested positive for COVID-19 or was sent home with potential symptoms, and the majority of the quarantines were due to exposure outside of school.

As of Friday morning, there were seven students in quarantine and zero staff members, and all seven of those students are in quarantine due to family members who were exposed or tested positive, she said. 

There are 476 students who are attending school traditionally this year and 49 who are doing virtual school as of Friday, and the number of students attending virtually has dropped a bit since the beginning of the year as some families wanted to return to the classroom and the school allowed them to do so, Culpepper said. 

“We are doing that as well as we can, because we know that we like to have our students in our school building,” she said.

Culpepper said the school has implemented some new cleaning procedures for the year, such as sanitizing the entire school three times per week with a Clorox 360 sanitizing machine, having custodians work inside the school and hiring someone else to do outside work, and eliminating cloth items from classroom and storing additional furniture for the year.

Students aren’t able to group together like years past, but teachers have been creative in finding ways to get the children out of their seats and moving around the classroom while still maintaining the proper distancing, Culpepper said.

“With our age, you need to pull them in, you can’t teach from a distance,” she said. 

With schools closing last March and students finishing the last school year online, there has been some remediation required for first graders who didn’t finish kindergarten in the classroom, but teachers tested each student at the beginning of the year and are working to fill in that gap, Culpepper said. 

“We teach them wherever they are,” she said. 

West Elementary School

West Elementary School Principal Jay Page said WES has had five students who tested positive for COVID-19, but three of those were tested before the first day of school, and one teacher has tested positive.

There have 49 students who have had to quarantine, but 33 of those were able to return because their potential exposure tested negative for the virus, and of the 16 students who had to quarantine for the full two weeks, four of those cases came from exposure at school, he said.

There have been three teachers who had to quarantine, and all of those exposures came from outside of school, Page said.

Elementary schools have an advantage when it comes to potential exposures because the students are in the same classroom all day, so the number of exposures and quarantines tends to be lower outside of middle and high school, he said.

With the loss of 10 weeks of instruction at the end of the last school year, teachers have been working to make sure there aren’t any gaps in students’ knowledge from the lost time, Page said. 

The DIBELS test is used by second- and third-graders to gauge their reading and comprehension skills, and the system changed from DIBELS Next to DIBELS 8 this year, which has a different set of standards from the previous test.

Page said the DIBELS scores are a little lower than previous years, which could be the result of students missing the end of last year or could be from the new test and new standards, but he is happy with the results so far. 

“I was encouraged by it, to be honest,” he said. 

The DIBELS test will be conducting again in the winter and in the spring, so that will give a better set of data with the new test for the school to compare this fall’s, Page said. 

“That’s where we’ll be able to see the growth,” he said.

Fourth through sixth grades take the Scantron Reading, Math and Science tests to determine whether they are meeting the proper benchmarks, and students are testing a little lower than they typically do, which could also be due to missing the end of last year, Page said. 

There have been several students who have started the year in virtual school and chose to return to traditional school, mainly because students or parents were struggling to keep up or accessing the materials online, Page said. 

After reaching a peak of around 85 students learning virtually, the number of students learning online has now dropped to around 70 after some families chose to return to traditional school, he said. 

Overall, the older students have handled virtual school better than the younger students, because when you look at a sixth-grader and a second-grader, the second-grader is going to need much more face-to-face interaction as they develop their learning skills, he said.

East Elementary School

East Elementary School Principal David Wiggins said his school has seen two students test positive for COVID-19 and zero teachers test positive since the school year began. 

There have been 63 students who have had to quarantine after a potential exposure to the virus and four teachers who have quarantined, but only 16 of those students and one teacher had to quarantine from an exposure that came at school, he said.

“We call that a success,” he said.

Wiggins said EES has made several new changes for the year, from everything like new dropoffs and pickups and checking the temperature of every student before they enter school to changing regular classroom and lunch procedures, and students and teachers have adapted to the changes. 

“Everything has just settled in to a smooth program right now,” he said. 

Wiggins said East Elementary’s DIBELS testing showed 73 percent proficiency in second grade and 76 percent proficiency in third grade, which is lower than the usual scores that are in the 80s. 

He said the Scantron test scores are about where he expected them to be, but second grade’s scores are lower than they should be. 

“I know it’s because of the missed time last year,” he said. “It’s nothing that we can’t fix.”

Attendance at the school has stayed at around 96-97 percent for the beginning of the year, which is actually a little higher than usual, and Wiggins also credited that to the early end of the last school year. 

“I really think it’s because they’ve been out for so long and they’re happy to be back,” he said. 

Cullman Middle School

Cullman Middle School has seen two students test positive for COVID-19, with one of those students on campus and the other already at home quarantining after a family member tested positive, said Principal Jake Johnson.

No teachers have tested positive, and there has been one who had to quarantine for the full 14 days after an exposure outside of school, he said.

There have been 228 students who have been sent home to quarantine after a potential exposure, with almost every one of them able to return within a day or two after that potential exposure tested negative, Johnson said. 

Of the students who had to be quarantined, there were 25 students who had to stay at home for the full 14 days after the school’s one positive case on campus, he said. 

Because one positive case has the potential to lead to the quarantining of more than 20 students who could have been exposed throughout the typical school day, Johnson presented an alternative schedule for the school that is meant to minimize the chance for exposure.

He said he and the rest of the CMS administration have put together a new schedule that will keep students in the same group throughout the day. The students who are in the same Zero Period class at the beginning of the day will stay together through the remainder of the day. 

With that change, the potential of exposure will drop from 20-30 students who could come in close contact with a positive case to four or five students who are together throughout the day, Johnson said.

“You’re talking about drastically reducing the number of students who could possibly be contacted,” he said. 

The new schedule changes the number of class periods to six and changes the bell schedule, which means that students will go to their four core classes, one elective and PE before school dismisses at 2:32 p.m.

That is around half an hour earlier that the school releases now, but teachers will still be on campus through 3:15 for any students who are unable to leave at 2:32 or want to do any extra work for their classes or electives, Johnson said.

The change from six to seven periods also extends each class period to last a little longer, which gives teachers more time with each class, he said. 

With school releasing at 2:35 and teachers on campus until 3:15, that also gives students a chance to get more assistance that they typically wouldn’t get, and the smaller number of students at that time means they could all socially distance, Johnson said. 

“You’re going to end up with students who want that extra help,” he said. 

Johnson said parents will be notified about the change in the coming week, and it will take effect on the following Monday. 

Cullman High School

Cullman High School Principal Kim Hall divided her school’s COVID-19 statistics into two parts.

CHS moved to a hybrid schedule on Sept. 8 that sends half of the school’s students to campus on Monday and Tuesday and the other half on Thursday and Friday, and the numbers indicate that change has led to fewer exposures. 

From Aug. 24 to Sept. 4, the school saw 111 COVID-related interactions with the school nurse, whether that was a student testing positive or showing symptoms, a parent calling or sending a note saying their child had symptoms or anything else involving symptoms, positive cases or exposures, she said. 

After the school made the switch to hybrid learning, the school has had 30 COVID-related interactions with the nurse, mainly due to the ability to social distance in the classroom, Hall said. 

With the ability to put greater distance between students in the classroom, no students need to be quarantined from a potential exposure on campus, and all 30 nurse interactions since moving to the hybrid schedule have been from exposures outside of school, she said. 

“They’re positive at home or they’ve been exposed at home or at work, but there has not been an exposure at school,” she said. 

Cullman High School has also seen an impact from last year’s early school closure, Hall said. 

The school’s graduation rate remained high at 96.6 percent in 2020 compared to 93.04 percent in 2019, but the number of students who demonstrated college and career readiness dropped from 96.15 percent in 2019 to 85.3 percent in 2020, she said. 

Hall said the school typically does one final round of the ACT WorkKeys test, which is used as an indicator for college and career readiness, but the school was unable to conduct the spring test because of the early closure of schools.

“We had a plan to still give them opportunities to credential, but we did lose two months with those students,” she said.

A random sampling of classes in each subject also shows that average class grades so far this year are trending slightly worse than the end-of-year averages from last year, which shows there is likely some regression from last year and some adjustments being made to new technology in the classroom, Hall said. 

“It all has an impact,” she said. 

Out of the 980 students enrolled at CHS, 774 are attending traditionally and 206 are attending virtually, Hall said.

Several of the teachers who are teaching virtual classes reported that they were being overwhelmed by the amount of emails they were receiving from students or parents who were trying to adapt to the new software, but everyone is getting working through the kinks and the school has made some adjustments to make things better for teachers, Hall said. 

“They are feeling much better,” she said. “At the beginning, they were overwhelmed because there was a lot of new technology.”

To make sure everyone is getting on the same page, CHS conducted a survey of students and teachers, and the majority of the responses indicated they were all comfortable with the new software or becoming more comfortable with it, Hall said.