Over six months of pandemic schooling, just 130 people are known to have caught Covid-19 while at school or at a school-sponsored event in Vermont. That’s according to outbreak data collected by the state Department of Health and obtained by VTDigger through a public records request.
The data, which covers the start of the school year through the end of February, suggests that outbreaks have occurred most frequently in elementary schools, despite research indicating that young children are far less likely to catch Covid-19 than teens and adults. Indoor sports have also emerged as a source of spread in the winter.
School-based transmission has nevertheless been quite modest, with, on average, just two cases per outbreak attributable to in-school spread.
“Schools are doing a really amazing job,” said Jillian Leikauskas, co-lead of the Department of Health’s outbreak prevention and response team.
The state has leaned heavily on local school districts to conduct contact tracing, and districts have generally been quick to isolate symptomatic students, identify close contacts and notify families, Leikauskas said.
Last fall was remarkably quiet, with not a single instance of in-school transmission recorded throughout September. The data shows there were at least four small outbreaks in October and two in November.
The winter was a different story, with a significant ramp-up in outbreaks as Vermont entered its second wave of the pandemic. Despite lengthy periods of school closure around the holidays, there were at least 14 outbreaks in December, 11 in January and 17 in February.
Twice a week throughout the year, the state has updated an online dashboard tracking Covid-19 cases in K-12 schools. But the dashboard reported each time someone — staff or student — came into school while they were considered infectious. What it did not report is when someone caught the virus at school.
VTDigger requested school outbreak data for September through February and received a school-by-school breakdown of all instances of in-school transmission recorded by the state.
It’s likely the state’s data does not capture every instance of in-school spread. The Department of Health noted that someone who caught the virus at school and fell ill but did not take a test would not be included in the count. Still, the data provided to VTDigger is the most comprehensive and granular information available about where, how often and when the virus has spread in Vermont’s K-12 settings.
18 elementary outbreaks
It documents 18 separate outbreaks at elementary schools, plus six at combined elementary and middle schools. It shows 10 outbreaks at high schools, four in middle schools, three at combined middle-high schools, and seven at preK-12 schools.
Why the virus appears to have spread more frequently in Vermont’s younger grades isn’t clear, though distancing requirements there are lower, and more young kids are back in school four or five days a week.
Most elementary schools have also adopted “pod” models, ensuring that students are divided into groups that do not mix. Leikauskas speculated that while this could be effective at keeping infections from spreading widely in a school building, it might also increase the likelihood that the virus would spread within pods, since cohorts of kids spend more time with one another.
But she stressed it could be for other reasons, too. Very young children are less likely to wear masks properly and maintain distance from one another. And older students are much better at keeping track of and reporting who they’ve been in contact with, which makes it easier to quickly isolate potentially infected peers.
“You can’t really ask a second-grader who you spent recess with,” Leikauskas said.
The vast majority of schools that experienced in-school transmission did so only once. Only four — the St. Albans Town Education Center, Washington Village School, Websterville Christian Academy and JJ Flynn Elementary — experienced more than one outbreak. Each of those was small, with only one to two cases attributed to in-school transmission.
By and large, most school-based outbreaks appear to have been small, with the number of documented school-based cases in the low single digits. But there have been some outliers.
Why in Stockbridge?
In a late December outbreak, 11 people are thought to have caught the virus at Stockbridge Central School, a tiny central Vermont elementary school. That’s the largest known school-based outbreak in the state.
Jamie Kinnarney, superintendent of the White River Valley Supervisory Union, expressed surprise at the number, and said it had never been provided to him by the Department of Health. Instead, Kinnarney said he had been relying on the public K-12 dashboard data, which currently shows that only six people this year have been at the Stockbridge school while infectious.
As for why spread occurred, Kinnarney said he wasn’t sure. The school follows the same protocols as all the others in the supervisory union, he said, and the others haven’t experienced problems. It’s possible one person was asymptomatic while infectious and at school for a particularly lengthy period of time, he said.
“I have no idea how else to explain it,” Kinnarney said.
Two other similarly sized outbreaks were documented at Rutland High School (10 cases of school spread) and Lyndon Institute (nine cases), both of which occurred in February. School officials in both locations named a common culprit: sports.
“This is really straightforward,” said Twiladawn Perry, head of school at Lyndon Institute. “It started with our hockey team.”
Whether to allow indoor winter sports has been one of the most contentious school reopening debates of the pandemic, and hockey in particular has been a stubborn source of outbreaks, in Vermont and elsewhere in the country. State officials gave the green light to winter sports in early February.
Public health officials often say it is difficult to tell if sports-related transmission actually occurs during games and practice, or while players are carpooling or hanging out before or after games and practice.
Perry said she believed the spread at Lyndon Institute appeared mostly related to events “peripheral” to the games themselves, especially since members of an opposing team that played against infected Lyndon athletes did not subsequently test positive.
Greg Schillinger, the principal of Rutland High, said that after doing much of the contact tracing himself, he’d found it difficult to say with much confidence exactly where transmission occurred during the school’s athletics-related outbreak.
“What became challenging is that the people who are on the same team together, potentially are also socializing outside of school,” he said. “So it wasn’t possible to specifically nail down.”
