Wichita school district’s latest COVID-19 report shows hundreds of staff in quarantine

Wichita school district staff with COVID-19 accounted for 673 of the 1,056 cases the district has reported since Aug. 8, according to Wichita Public Schools COVID-19 numbers, which were updated Friday for the first time since mid-November.

School district spokesperson Susan Arensman said staff workloads affected how long it took to have the document updated.

Friday’s numbers show that cases from Nov. 15 until Thursday increased from 633 to 1,056.

Staff cases went from 389 to 673 in the latest report, which is roughly a 73% increase in about 3.5 weeks. It took more than two months to reach 389. The 673 staff cases are nearly 64% of the total.

In-person students have 184 cases, up from 106 in the last report, and remote students reached 199, up from 138. The 383 total number of students with cases represent an increase of around 57% from the last report.

Wichita schools began after Labor Day in September.

A separate quarantine list, which has been updated during the moratorium from reporting cases, showed 178 additional employees under quarantine from last week. A total of 1,044 employees are under quarantine, which is about 14% of the workforce.

The staff quarantines, lack of substitutes and rising COVID-19 case numbers and indicators forced the WPS Board of Education to vote on Nov. 30 to send about 13,000 elementary students home to learn remotely through at least Jan. 11. Students at middle schools and high schools have been remote learning since the start of the academic year.

This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 4:24 PM.