A school district in central Virginia will close all public schools until Sept. 13 following a rise in covid positivity rates.
The News & Advance reports on the closure, which Amherst County Public School System Superintendent Rob Arnold called “a major health issue in our community.”
Arnold said 198 active positive cases of COVID-19 have been reported since the school year began Aug. 18.
During the entire 2020-21 school year, the division saw just around 100 positive cases of the virus.
“All students and staff should consider that they have experienced some exposure to COVID in the last week of school, and to act accordingly,” he said.
It is the latest in a slate of rural school districts to pause in-person instruction following exponential increases in covid infections. Other districts in Illinois, Kentucky, and Texas have had multiple school districts to shut down in the last two weeks.
District Administration, which tracks such closures, lists a preponderance of closures in the deep south, where mask and distancing mandates dramatically differ from other districts.
The perfect storm of the delta variant, low vaccination rates in parts of the country, and political resistance to universal masking have sent tens of thousands of students and staff members into isolation and quarantine just as the new school year has gotten underway,” says an introduction to the tracker.
