RIVERTON — After 17 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 at Riverton High School in the past two weeks, the Jordan School District Board of Education voted 6-1 late Wednesday to close school Thursday and implement remote learning on Friday.
School will resume on a normal schedule Monday, but officials will carefully monitor coronavirus cases to see if additional action is needed. The school will undergo deep cleaning Thursday and Friday.
Nine of the 17 cases were among students involved in two extracurricular activities, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey said.
It is homecoming week and the school has a football game planned Friday night, among other activities. The school board said activities will be conducted at administrators’ discretion.
The Salt Lake County Health Department recommended the school district quarantine all students for 14 days, switch to virtual learning, conduct no extracurricular activities and conduct a deep cleaning of schools.
But some board members argued that the cases were clustered among a couple of groups and quarantining all of Riverton High’s 2,115 students seemed excessive.
Numbers of confirmed cases in the Jordan School District climbed from 50 cases over the past two weeks as of Monday to 74 on Wednesday, according to the Salt Lake County Department of Health dashboard.
The dashboard does not attribute increased numbers of cases to specific schools but it indicates if schools exceed 15 cases.
Riverton High School Principal Carolyn Gough said the school has carefully followed safety protocols and has prepared for all contingencies. “Some things are just beyond our control,” she said.
But safety of staff, students and faculty is the greatest concern.
“We’ve been preparing. We are resilient. We will be able to get through any mitigation strategy that’s needed to carry on,” she said.
All students have a device and can pivot to distance learning if necessary, she said.
Dylan Gorringe, a Riverton High student and member of the girls soccer team, said she was pulled out of class when she was told to quarantine due to COVID-19 exposure.
“I kind of felt like I was treated like a criminal,” she said.
Her mother said quarantines and remote learning, which all Utah students experienced last spring, take a toll on students’ mental health.
“When high school soccer started, I saw her come back to life,” said Ariane Gorringe.
Sen. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, expressed confidence in the elected school board but urged board members to take a conservative approach “to keep our children learning in the way that they best can, which is direct instruction from their educators.” Whatever the board does, it will set a precedent, he said.
“I know that this job is not what you signed up for when you ran for election originally. It wasn’t in any of our job descriptions to deal with a global pandemic. It wasn’t any of our job descriptions to try and write on the fly, health policy on how to run a school and how to run a society, and how to do anything that we’ve been doing over the last few months. I will say that as a legislator, this has been one of the most difficult times of my service,” he said.
Board member Janice Voorhies, who cast the lone vote against the board proposal, expressed concerns about the well-being of teachers and other adults who work in the school.
Earlier Wednesday, during a meeting of the Utah Legislature’s Education Interim Committee, Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, asked State Epidemiologist Dr. Angela Dunn if was possible to truncate the 14-day quarantine period in schools if teachers and students were tested twice during a seven-day period.
Dunn said when the initial guidance for school reopening was issued, state officials recommended that as long as students or employees who were exposed were asymptomatic, they could continue going to school provided they checked for symptoms daily and wore masks, which is the same guidance for essential employees.
“That changed due to public outcry to follow a stricter quarantine protocol, which is now in place,” she said.
Dunn said the state’s guidance includes recommendations from public health authorities but “that authority lies with the school board so each school board is allowed to do, of course, what they think is best for their community. We recommend consulting with our local health department. I know some are already in the process of doing that,” she said.
Dunn also said the state health department has reinstated its contract with a testing site so it has control over who can be tested instead of relying on health care systems.
“We’re actually in the process of opening up the codes, if you will, for teachers to be able to go to any test site and get tested. That’s not just teachers, it’s any school-related staff employee,” she said.
In recent weeks, a handful of Utah district and charter schools have had to take steps to reduce COVID-19 infections by shifting to remote learning or modifying school schedules so fewer students are in classrooms, making it easier to social distance or conduct contact tracing.
Last Friday, Canyons School District officials announced Corner Canyon High School would pivot to a split schedule, which has now been extended through Sept. 25. At least 21 confirmed cases were associated with the school late last week.
Earlier this month, Pleasant Grove High School in Alpine School District imposed a split schedule due to multiple coronavirus cases.
Around the same time, on-campus learning was halted at American Preparatory Academy’s Draper 1 location on Tuesday after 15 positive cases of COVID-19 were reported at the public charter school.
Utah Military Academy also shifted to online learning after nine adults on its Camp Williams campus tested positive for COVID-19 in early September.