District 214’s Deficient Covid Dashboard Trails its Neighbors – Why?

Below is a screenshot of School District 214’s Covid dashboard as of January 6, 2022.

You may wonder how this compares to before winter break.  You may wonder how this count breaks down between students and teachers, considering that teacher absences require finding substitute teachers.  When asked about this, a district staff member told a parent that no further information is provided for “privacy” reasons.

But it turns out that no nearby school districts are so tight-fisted with their covid data.  None of them have adopted such a bizarre definition of “privacy” as to prohibit even a split between students and staff.

Here are some examples.

District 211, just to the west, provides a dashboard which includes data by school, split by students and staff, and provides the information by day.  The snip below is for a single school, for a single week, but they provide the same table for each school and preserve all historical data, week after week.

To the east, Glenbrook District 225 provides information on the local area as well as school information.  Here is their chart, showing student and staff counts separately, for each school in separate tabs.

To the southeast, here is Maine Township, again with tables for each school (all data is included but requires scrolling so cannot be captured in a single snip).

Here’s Stevenson.  Note that there is a second graph for quarantines.

I could continue, but I think the above examples should be sufficient to demonstrate that District 214 is a clear outlier in its minimal covid data.

Why are they being so restrictive?  I can guess.

I can guess that they think that this will allow them to tell the narrative they want to tell, whenever they want to tell, regardless of whether that’s an insistence that Everything Is Awesome, or, in a sudden shift later on, It’s Time To Panic.

Or perhaps the district is simply so accustomed to a mindset of “share as little data as you can get away with,” that they don’t even have a purpose, but that it is simply perfectly normal to them.

In either case, the school board ought to be embarrassed at this comparison.

 

— Authored by Elizabeth Bauer