Update: SLO County public, private schools report more than 750 COVID cases
As COVID-19 cases in San Luis Obispo County continued to decrease, local schools were allowed to reopen campuses to allow more students to learn in person.
Each school is held to a high standard of health and safety measures vetted and approved by the county Public Health Department.
Even so, most schools had reported positive COVID-19 cases involving students and employees.
When a school is made aware of a positive coronavirus case, its first step is to figure out whether that individual had any close contacts with other students or employees. If they did, those people need to quarantine for 14 days, meaning a transition back to distance-only learning.
As of June 14, 260 school employees and 514 students — 774 in total — had reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 across all San Luis Obispo County public school districts, charter schools and private schools that have sent data to The Tribune. That’s up a total of 744 cases from May 25, according to The Tribune’s data.
Most COVID-19 cases reported come from transmission outside of school. This means that a student or employee who tests positive for the virus was most likely exposed from someone in their household and not in the classroom, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Even so, two schools in San Luis Obispo County temporarily closed their doors due to a rise in COVID-19 cases among students or staff.
On Jan. 25, an Atascadero elementary school closed to in-person instruction for one week after the school reported five new COVID-19 cases within two weeks. And a Paso Robles elementary school closed to in-person instruction Feb. 2 through Feb. 16 after a spike in cases was reported by the district.
Although Atascadero High School saw a spike in COVID-19 cases the last two weeks of May — reporting 20 new cases among students within those weeks — the school did not close.
All San Luis Obispo County Office of Education school sites were added to the database on Nov. 30, but the county office reported the total number of cases at its schools, not the number at each individual school.
Most of the 10 local public school districts and three local charter schools in the county released their COVID-19 case data to The Tribune.
Grizzly Youth Academy was the only public school in the county that did not share the number of COVID-19 cases from students or employees with The Tribune.
When a school or district is noted as “not reporting” in the table below, that means the school or district was not reporting COVID-19 cases to The Tribune. The school or district may have been reporting those cases to the local or state public health departments.
Search our database for individual schools or districts.
Final update: June 14 at 9:26 a.m.
Can’t see this database? Click here to view it.
This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
