Teenage parties spread COVID-19. Can Fort Worth schools punish students who attend?
Reported cases of COVID-19 continue to climb in Fort Worth schools, a trend public health officials say is being driven by students going to parties and other social events where the virus spreads easily.
But education leaders and experts say school districts have little authority to police students’ behavior when they aren’t at school. That means, despite the hazards associated with parties and social gatherings, there’s little districts can do to keep students from going to them.
Social gatherings are the biggest factor driving Tarrant County’s recent surge in COVID-19 cases, said Brian Murnahan, a spokesman for Tarrant County Public Health. Last month, Tarrant County health director Vinny Taneja suggested school districts in the Fort Worth area try to take a harder line when they find out students are going to parties and other social gatherings.
“If [school officials] find social media posts of those parties and recognize their own school kids, maybe they can find a way to penalize it or make it known that that’s not appreciated because that’s bringing COVID into schools,” Taneja said.
But school officials in Fort Worth say legal and logistical issues make it nearly impossible for schools to control students’ behavior when they’re off campus. Clint Bond, a spokesman for the Fort Worth school district, said the district has no plans to monitor social media for parties or other events.
“Our teachers and leaders at the higher grades might certainly hear of something but we don’t have the resources to investigate or track something like that,” Bond said.
Deekay Fox, a spokeswoman for Uplift Education, said the charter network returned students at all its schools to remote learning for two weeks after Thanksgiving break as a proactive measure. But the network, which operates schools across North Texas, has no way of monitoring students’ behavior outside of school, she said.
Likewise, Jennifer Flores, a spokeswoman for IDEA Public Schools, said the charter network has taken several steps to slow the spread of the virus in its Tarrant County schools, including installing Plexiglas dividers at students’ desks, requiring students to wear masks throughout the day and keeping students in the same room for all their classes and lunch periods. But the network doesn’t monitor students’ social media accounts, she said.
School leaders across North Texas are concerned about how social gatherings drive the spread of the virus. In a letter to parents last month, Grapevine-Colleyville Superintendent Robin Ryan said school officials had learned through contact tracing that the biggest sources of transmission in the district were “events without masks and social distancing held outside of school settings.” Ryan warned parents that continued spread of COVID-19 jeopardized the district’s ability to keep schools open for in-person learning.
“We need everyone’s help to keep our schools open for in-person instruction and extracurricular experiences,” he said. “If the virus spread continues to increase, we might have to close individual schools. In addition, each time a staff member has to quarantine, it diminishes the chances for in-person instruction to continue.”
The same day, Mike Davis, interim superintendent in the Krum school district, released a letter to parents and students explaining why the district was returning to remote learning. Davis said the district faced a shortage of teachers and support staff due to a spike in COVID-19 cases. Davis said that spike was driven in large part by Halloween parties.
In the Aledo school district, football coach Tim Buchanan told the Star-Telegram last month he was frustrated with “knucklehead parents” renting venues to hold Halloween parties and homecoming events for their children. Those gatherings, not sporting events, are to blame for the rise in COVID-19 case counts, Buchanan said.
Monitoring social media is a challenge
Legally, there’s nothing that would prevent school officials from monitoring students’ publicly-available social media pages, said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a professor at the Texas A&M University School of Law. If students have their social media privacy settings set to allow anyone to view their pages, school officials have the same access as anyone else, she said.
“Logistically, it’s sort of a different question,” Bloch-Wehba said. “What’s the district going to do, put an entire team of people on active duty monitoring an entire district’s worth of students’ social media accounts? That doesn’t really make any sense.”
More likely, she said, school officials would look through the social media profiles of any students who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 or were in close contact with someone who had contracted the disease to find out where they’d been and whom they’d spent time with. But that could raise concerns about how districts used students’ private medical information, she said.
Districts could find other, more workable strategies like only monitoring the social media pages of a smaller subset of students, Bloch-Wehba said. But those strategies would raise problems of their own, she said.
“The only way I can imagine the district could do this at all is by picking and choosing students it suspects of doing something off campus that the district doesn’t approve of,” she said. “But maybe we don’t want the school district to be able to pick and choose students to punish based on their Facebook activity on a totally arbitrary basis.”
David DeMatthews, a professor in the University of Texas’ College of Education, said he’s spoken with several superintendents and school principals across Central Texas, and none had considered watching students’ social media accounts to see who participated in parties. For the most part, DeMatthews said, anything students do off school grounds and outside the school day is out of districts’ control.
The one exception to that rule is cyberbullying, DeMatthews said. David’s Law, a state law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2017, allows districts to punish students for cyberbullying that occurs off campus. The bill was a response to the death of 16-year-old David Molak, a high school sophomore in a San Antonio-area school district who died by suicide after being harassed online. But the law is narrowly tailored to the issue of bullying, DeMatthews said, so it doesn’t allow districts to police students’ off-campus behavior that doesn’t fall into that category.
Another option could be for districts not to punish students who participated in parties, but insist they work from home and quarantine for two weeks afterward. But DeMatthews said a policy like that would still take more resources to enforce than districts have to spare. Teachers and school administrators are already stretched thin because of the COVID-19 pandemic and don’t have the time or energy to take on a new set of responsibilities, he said. And the blow back such a policy would create from parents and students would most likely eclipse any benefit the district gained from it, he said.
“If a district was going to invest that type of time and resources, I think they would only just open themselves up to more complaints and challenges from parents that they don’t need right now,” he said.
If school officials are concerned about students catching COVID-19 at parties and other gatherings and bringing it to school, DeMatthews said it’s more effective to communicate with them consistently about the importance of isolating and other practices the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends, like frequent hand washing. Schools exist to educate students, he said, and they’re better equipped to do that than they are to try to monitor students’ behavior after the school day ends.
Transparency is key for Fort Worth schools
It’s particularly dangerous when students go to parties and other social gatherings because if they do contract COVID-19, they could return to school and spread it to other students, teachers and staff before they know they’re sick, said Diana Cervantes, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at UNT Health Sciences Center.
When a patient catches COVID-19, they’re generally at their most contagious early on, either before they show symptoms or when their symptoms are so mild that they don’t think they’re sick, Cervantes said. In that regard, it’s different from other diseases like Ebola, in which the most contagious patients are visibly ill, she said. It’s one of the factors that has allowed the novel coronavirus to spread so easily, she said.
It’s important for school districts to remind students and their parents of the risks of going to social gatherings at a time when COVID-19 case counts are surging, Cervantes said. But trying to punish students for going to those events might not be the best approach, she said.
Cervantes, a former Tarrant County Public Health epidemiologist, said she noticed during many of her infectious disease investigations that the social events where diseases spread most often weren’t always house parties thrown by teenagers. In many cases, she said, they were church events or other gatherings where children went with their families. Those events are becoming more frequent as Christmas approaches, and children often don’t have much choice about whether to attend those events, she said. So it might not make sense to punish them for having been there, she said.
The most effective thing districts can do to help prevent COVID-19 outbreaks in schools is to be as transparent as possible with parents, Cervantes said. Districts should let parents know as soon as a cluster of cases develops in a school, she said, and they should remind parents to look out for any signs of the disease before sending their children to school in person. Schools also need to be vigilant about screening students, teachers and staff for symptoms of COVID-19 and make sure parents understand the steps they’re taking to prevent its spread, Cervantes said.
Public health officials have advocated for those techniques for decades, Cervantes said, and they’re still the most effective tools for slowing the spread of infectious diseases.
