DALLAS — At first glance, the latest iteration of the state’s COVID-19 case tracker for Texas public schools might be cause for alarm.
Case counts at a dozen of the area’s largest districts — including Lewisville, Frisco, Birdville, Richardson and Denton ISDs — climbed by over 100 student cases last week, according to Friday’s update.
In isolation, that rise would be significant. That’s not the whole story, though.
School closures on Labor Day coincided with the state’s deadline for weekly reporting. As a result, 83% of the area’s 205 public school districts and charter operators did not report any staff or student cases for the week ending on Sept. 5.
Any unreported cases from that period were to be included into this week’s report, according to Chris Van Deusen, the director of media relations for the Department of State Health Services.
Those types of quirks, combined with the weeklong reporting lag of the DSHS dashboard, highlight the difference in utility between the state’s data and local COVID-19 trackers updated regularly by school districts.
For example, Frisco ISD backdates each case in its local tracker to the first onset of symptoms, then provides a seven-day rolling average of the total count.
“It helps us keep a better idea of what’s happening, as opposed to the state data,” Frisco ISD spokeswoman Meghan Cone said.
State officials stress that DSHS’s data should be used as a historical reference to provide broad trends, not as a current snapshot of conditions at local schools.
“If parents are going to be looking for something that tells them what’s happening in real time, that’s not where they should be looking,” Frank Ward, a spokesman for the Texas Education Agency, said of the DSHS data. “Invariably, we’re going to have a bit of a delay when the cases are recorded and reflected.”
That said, some of the data that schools believe they are reporting to the state are not showing up in DSHS’s official count.
As of Friday, Dallas ISD — the area’s largest school district, with 143,000 students —reported 1,274 cases of COVID-19 among staff and students so far this September on its district dashboard.
But over the past two reporting periods, it’s hard to see those numbers reflected completely in the state data.
The state’s tally of Dallas’ new cases shows only 22 COVID-19 infections over those two weeklong periods. Its overall total for the district, however, does seem to be taking the cases into account, going up 1,076 cases over that time span.
Therefore, Dallas’ cases are being reflected in the state’s cumulative totals -- which topped 150,000 last week — but not in the weekly count, which was already skewed by the Labor Day holiday.
DISD’s Director of Health Services Jennifer Finley said that the district routinely “double and triple checks” everything from the district’s public-facing dashboard. She added that the district submits the same data that it puts on its tracker to the state.
“Not sure why the state’s data isn’t matching up,” she said. “The state’s dashboard, to me, is a little bit confusing.”
Lara Anton, a spokeswoman at DSHS, said that issue is likely related to timing. If districts miss the deadline for reporting data from a seven-day period, it would be added to cumulative counts for that district, she said.
“We’ve heard that some school districts are struggling to do the data entry in a timely manner due to the large number (of) cases in their district,” Anton said. “We’ve recommended that they submit reports daily instead of waiting until the Monday deadline.”
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