Communication and data

FCPS has an assortment of metrics that determine whether it is safe for its predetermined groups to return to school on their assigned date. How they have communicated those numbers, though, is beyond disappointing.

“The metrics don’t make sense, there’s no [proper coronavirus data] that they’ve set and they’ve been clear about, and they won’t show [us] where they are compared to that chart,” math teacher Crissie Ricketts said. “It would be great if the entire populace of Fairfax County could be tracking [the metrics], so we would have some advanced notice that [delays and closures] were coming.”

Ultimately, it’s not the politicians on the board or the planners in Fairfax County who pay the price for this lack of transparency and communication; it’s the families, students and teachers preparing for such a stressful transition who face the brunt end of FCPS’s unacceptable irresponsibility.

“I know friends who are elementary special education teachers, and they had spent literally a week 24/7 getting their classrooms ready for face-to-face [earlier in the year],” Ricketts said. “And then within 24 hours of the return to school date, they had to redo everything they were going to do the next day [because the date was delayed]. Talk about stress.”

FCPS’ COVID-19 case data is also substandard, especially considering it is one of the country’s wealthiest school districts. Case figures are split into three groups designated for students, staff and visitors, each providing the number of self-reported cases collected from the previous day. That does almost nothing.

Basic digits aren’t enough to tell the whole story. How many people did the infected individual interact with? Did they break any health guidelines? Have they quarantined yet? How many people still have the virus? Neighboring counties already provide at least some of this data, while FCPS hasn’t gone much farther than telling families how they will communicate with them.

The burden FCPS is placing on teachers is inadmissible, but it also confuses people as to the purpose of the online case reporting site.

“Putting [COVID-19 cases] up on a website that people then have to go and check, when [the district] set up the idea that parents really don’t need to check anything for the kids, that it’s the teachers that need to be communicating with them all the time seems a flawed model,” Caponetti said.

To make matters worse, it is unreasonably difficult to find out what the board and superintendent have been discussing. All meetings and presentations are available on a platform called BoardDocs, which can be disorienting for first-time visitors or less tech savvy teachers and parents.

Once visitors find the meeting information, the most important content is buried in the hours-long recordings, which are posted on YouTube. The videos don’t even have captions or transcripts for viewers to quickly navigate around. In the end, many people will just give up because they don’t have the time to skip through a six-hour long video and find one specific topic the board discussed.

Not only are the videos too long, but they are confusing to new viewers too; people who don’t know what “calling the question” means or what board procedure is will be lost when watching the recordings. FCPS should provide an accessible page on their website where visitors can see what the board voted on and YouTube timestamps for each of the topics discussed.

The meetings’ lack of accessibility repeats the lack of transparency present in district’s COVID-19 reporting, something a public school district should never be associated with, particularly in a pandemic.