Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Unveils COVID-19 Dashboard

CHARLOTTE, NC — Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools reported 27 positive COVID-19 cases and a 6.3 percent test positivity rate last week, the school district said Monday. The news comes as the school district unveiled its new COVID-19 Metrics dashboard as it readies to expand in-person instruction to K-5 students next week.

The dashboard, which will be updated every Friday by 6 p.m., offers a weekly snapshot of COVID-19 cases in CMS schools, as well as a two-week rolling assessment of trends.

For the week of Oct. 17 - Oct. 23, for example, CMS offered limited in-person instruction for students with disabilities and pre-K. Of those 2,731 students, eight tested positive. Of the district's 19,106 employees, 16 tested positive.

Next week, the number of students in attendance in classrooms will increase as K-5 students return.

"We designed the dashboard specifically to provide guidance to our board and our superintendent about conditions in our schools so that they can make appropriate decisions," said Kathy Elling, chief school performance officer at CMS.

"We are looking at these metric over a 14-day period," she said. "No one metric signifies any decision point for the district and no one metric over the period of 14 days triggers a decision point."

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There were no COVID-19 clusters reported in CMS. Statewide, however, clusters are increasing. North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services defines a cluster as five or more lab-confirmed cases that are linked. As of Monday, there were 26 COVID-19 clusters reported in K-12 schools in North Carolina and eight active clusters at child care centers. At least 318 positive COVID-19 cases were associated with school clusters in K-12 schools and at least 410 positive cases and three deaths associated with child care centers.

The CMS COVID-19 Metric Dashboard may be found here.

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