Virus outbreak at Sycamore Middle School, confirms superintendent

SYCAMORE – Superintendent Steve Wilder said an outbreak of COVID-19 was confirmed Friday at Sycamore Middle School, concentrated in about 10 students in 6th and 8th grades.

According to local public health guidance, Wilder said, an incident is considered a school outbreak when two or more individuals are identified who may have shared exposure on school grounds. Outbreaks don’t include secondary potential exposure cases, such as a sibling from the same household.

As of Friday, 16 positive cases of COVID-19 have been found among Sycamore students, and contact tracers within the district have identified 54 close contacts and notified them accordingly, Wilder said. 97 students are in quarantine only a week and a half into the school year.

Wilder said about 10 of the positive cases are at the middle school, where most students are ages 11 to 14. He said that neither entire classrooms or sports teams have been quarantined as of Friday.

“It’s hard to say whether transmission occurred at school,” Wilder said. “We know there were students in the same classroom that both tested positive, so there’s a possibility of that which is why I think we’re taking, in conjunction with the health department, the approach that we have.”

The Daily Chronicle obtained emails sent by the district to some parents whose children had been identified as a potential close contact for virus exposure, and at least two of the cases were last in the school building Aug. 20 and 25.

Sycamore District 427 and DeKalb District 428 welcomed students back for the school year Aug. 18. Genoa-Kingston District 424 schools began classes Aug. 17.

Quarantine procedures in Sycamore

Wilder said the district has protocols in place to inform parents and students involved as efficiently as possible, although this past week caused some communication delays because of the volume of cases that the district needed to contact trace.

“There are multiple steps here,” Wilder said. “When there’s an individual case, this process goes a little faster but it’s still time sensitive. This week it’s taken us a little bit longer just because of the number of cases and our commitment to doing our due diligence when we’re contact tracing.”

After a positive case is identified, district contact tracers speak with DeKalb County Health Department officials and prepare an email notification that is then sent to students and families who tested positive and those identified as close contacts. A close contact is a student who was within 3 feet of a positive case for an accumulation of 15 minutes or more.

Any student who is vaccinated does not need to quarantine as long as they are not exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms, Wilder said.

Health and school officials have recommended a series of quarantine options for close or potentially exposed contacts, with each choice offered based on circumstantial factors such as how much time a student has spent with the positive case.

Sycamore health staff will tell a potentially exposed student and family they need to either: quarantine for 14 days, 10 days, or 7 days, or they will be offered the chance to take a COVID-19 test four times for a week. If they test negative, they can remain in the building.

Each option is offered to each family and student differently based on the circumstances, Wilder said.

Although Wilder said School-associated COVID-19 cases are not contact traced by the health department, health officials do try to provide guidance and support. Building nurses, health aids and administrators conduct contact tracing by consulting seating charts used in each classroom.

“We do have assigned seating in the classrooms which has been super helpful,” Wilder said. “There’s assigned seating on some of our buses but not necessarily all of them so that’s something that we’re obviously rectifying. But the buses that did have seating charts, that was super helpful. Another advantage is that our bus drivers know the students really well.”

He said school lunchrooms also don’t have assigned seating because of the number of students in them compared with the same time in 2020 when schools were using hybrid learning models to stagger the volume of children in a room at one time.

“We space students out as much as we can given the space we have,” Wilder said. “Fortunately, the middle school has a good-sized area for lunch, and then we do use space in adjacent hallways.”

Wilder also said the district intends to continue updating the online COVID-19 dashboard weekly, and expects it to be updated and online early next week.

Wilder praised district health staff and reiterated earlier school board remarks he made by asking parents to keep their children home from school if they are experiencing any type of illness or symptoms, regardless of how minor or severe.

“By and large, I think parents have been understanding, working with us,” Wilder said. “But we’re still seeing a variety of responses. Some parents are a little frustrated – not necessarily with us, but just that the pandemic is still kind of lingering here. We are really in the third school year [affected], so we see a little of that and we understand.”