SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — Sarasota County schools reopened Monday. The new School Superintendent Dr. Brennen Asplen says pushing back the first day of school helped the district better prepare for a new school year during a pandemic.
“I think the school board made a great decision pushing that back to August 31,” Asplen said. “That gave us much more time to prepare our schools and to train our teachers.”
10 Tampa Bay asked the school district if there have been any reported positive COVID-19 cases so far. A spokesperson for the district is looking into it.
To make it easier for parents and others in the community to track COVID-19 cases within the school district, school leaders are creating a data dashboard.
“We are creating a data dashboard that we are actually going to put on our webpage that we will keep updated, if not daily, definitely weekly,” Asplen said.
The dashboard was not up and running for the first day of school. The Communications Director for the School District Craig Maniglia says they are still working on it and hope to have it up next Monday. He says the process of creating the dashboard is taking longer than planned, after changing the format of it.
“The dashboard will tell you that we have X positive and X in quarantine,” Maniglia said.
That format wasn't the original plan. The dashboard was going to be a generic overview of a total number in the district, but now Maniglia says they are going to be more detailed.
He says Sarasota County’s school COVID-19 dashboard will be similar, if not identical, to the one you can find on the School District of Hillsborough County website.
The positive COVID-19 cases will be broken down by school and will differentiate between if the case represents a student or employee.
Maniglia says they want to be as transparent and forthcoming as possible during this situation.
This dashboard, however, is not the only way they’ll communicate positive cases.
“There will be Robo calls from the principal to the community that tells you there was a situation in the school and that the people who needed to be notified have been notified and the school has been cleaned and safe to return,” Maniglia said.
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