Houston-area high school closes for 3 days due to COVID-19

CROSBY, Texas (KTRK) -- Crosby High School will be closed Wednesday through the end of the week after more than four people tested positive for COVID-19 during a seven-day rolling average.

Crosby ISD has a policy which calls for the closing of any school that has a positive rate of .2% or higher during a seven-day rolling average.

According to the Crosby ISD COVID-19 dashboard, there are ten current positive cases among high school students and 17 in self-quarantine. Superintendent Dr. Scott Davis said the cases are mostly among volleyball players. The school will be deep cleaned.

The rolling average, which is also disclosed on the online dashboard, gives parents a warning about a possible closure.

"We've said we're going to do certain things and right now, we're making sure we're providing our response to things we said we would do," Davis told ABC13.

Students who opted for face-to-face instruction started on Sep. 8. Roughly 800 out of 1,800 students returned to the building.

This isn't the first time the district had had to close a school. Last week, an elementary and a middle school were closed for three days, said Davis.

Some parents wonder if three days is long enough.

"If they've got people who have [coronavirus,] they have students who haven't gotten tested and it's going to come back to the school Monday and it's going to start all over again," said parent Ryland Ards.

Crosby ISD released the following information in a statement:

We have established closure criteria for our campuses that would lead us to close any campus for cleaning. This criteria counts COVID positive cases aggregated from both students and teachers via a rolling, seven-day average. Using a rolling average affords students, parents, and staff a bit of a warning that an impending closure exists. We want to stay safe while at school, but we do not want to surprise our stakeholders that a closure must occur.

Any closed campus reverts to 100% remote instruction for the duration of the three days, obviously. When possible, we would rather utilize both Saturday and Sunday in the three-day closure, but in the case of the HS, we will reach that average tomorrow.

Using a percentage of .2% of the campus's capacity provides the rolling average. That is simply 4 positive cases for our HS, for example. Yes, that is conservative, but we are also living out these procedures in real-time as we work through this unprecedented school year.
Once we return from the closure, we reset the average to begin again for that campus.

We will have the HS closed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. We will open the campus on Monday, Oct. 5.