As COVID surges across the region, 11 out of 209 Montgomery County Public Schools will be going virtual, starting Wednesday, for the next fourteen days.

Interim Superintendent Dr. Monifa McKnight said in a press conference Tuesday morning that those schools had reached a threshold of more than 5% of students and staff testing positive for COVID over the winter break. Dozens more are close to that threshold. As of Monday morning, MCPS recorded more than 5,600 positive cases among staff and students over the winter break, including 4,677 during the last five days of break.

Schools going virtual until Jan. 19 are as follows:

Rock Terrace School
Cannon Road Elementary School
North Chevy Chase Elementary School
Hallie Wells Elementary School
Monocacy Elementary School
Roberto Clemente Middle School
Forest Knolls Elementary School
Waters Landing Elementary School
Rosemont Elementary School
Seneca Valley High School
Sherwood Elementary School

Jimmy D’Andrea, McKnight’s chief of staff, told county councilmembers Tuesday morning that parents will now be able to go online and view the number of positive cases in their schools daily by 7 p.m. Data on positive cases in schools will be broken down into three categories: green, yellow and red. Green means less than 3% of students and staff have tested positive for COVID in the last 14 days, yellow means between 3 and 5% have tested positive for COVID within the last 14 days, and red means more than 5% of students and staff are positive in the last 14 days. At least 89 schools are in the yellow and could go into the red soon, according to school officials.

If a school is in the red category, school officials may decide to go virtual; however, Montgomery County Assistant Chief Administrative Officer Earl Stoddard said the 5% threshold is a recommended target, not a trigger to halt in-person learning. Instead, the school system will confer with the county’s health department to investigate the outbreaks. The health department will then determine if the outbreaks are isolated to a particular sports team or classroom, or if they impact the entire school community.

Some parent groups in the county and across the state are outraged at the closure, even if it’s a small percentage of schools. More than 2,000 parents with the groups Montgomery County Families for Education and Accountability and Coalition of Maryland Parents and Students joined other parent groups across the U.S., including groups in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, in signing a petition asking federal, state, and local officials to keep schools open. The petition cites remarks made by President Joe Biden last month saying that “we can keep our K-12 schools open, and that’s exactly what we should be doing.”

Jennifer Reesman, a pediatric psychologist and parent to a sixth-grader in MCPS, told DCist/WAMU that she and other parents are worried how school closures will affect students’ ability to learn.

“I think everyone is in shock,” Reesman said. “I can’t say I’ve talked to a single parent that is pleased about this.”

Reesman added that the positive COVID cases are based on students and staff out of school during the winter break.

“Yes there is a lot of anxiety, and I talk with a lot of parents who are anxious about COVID,” Reesman said. “However, none of the data we have says that closing schools is going to do anything about the spread of this virus in our community.”

McKnight emphasized that the categorization of schools was an alternative to shutting all schools down. She added that lack of staffing has also been an issue at schools that have had to go virtual.

McKnight noted that schools were just one piece of the public health landscape. “Closing down schools is not going to solve the problem of COVID19 spread in an entire community,” she said.

McKnight also said that schools will be providing KN95 masks to teachers and staff, and more at-home rapid test kits will be made available to families.

Germantown Resident Andrew Ross, father to a sophomore at Seneca Valley High School–one of the 11 schools going virtual–told DCist/WMAU that virtual learning was “awful last year.”

“My daughter didn’t learn anything at all…she was unhappy with virtual learning,” Ross said. “[MCPS] needs to get their act together, consult with health experts, make a plan, and execute that plan.”

Other parents, like Cheryl Horn, a mom to an 11th-grader and a special education kindergarten teacher in MCPS, think shuttering schools was the right decision.

“The safety precautions in schools are not enough to keep them open,” Horn told DCist/WAMU.

Hannah Donart, a mom to second and fifth grade students at Monocacy Elementary School, one of the 11 schools, agrees with Horn. She told DCist/WAMU her family was exposed to COVID while flying to Chicago during winter break.

Donart, a public health expert who works remotely from home, said, “If you want to keep schools open, you have to test…If you’re not testing, you’re not catching those asymptomatic cases potentially.”

Over the winter break, MCPS relied on self-reporting by families and school staff. Donart added that the self-reporting to MCPS was likely an undercount.

Donart also said that parents who don’t have the luxury of staying home with their kids need a way to send their kids to school safely.

“[Their kids] need to be prioritized first for testing and there need to be equity hubs or some place safe they can return to, so they don’t give it to their families,” she said.

Donart and more than 1,500 other parents started sending petitions to MCPS officials, County Executive Marc Elrich, and councilmembers after Dec. 23 demanding, among other things, that the school system implement testing prior to the returning from break for students and teachers, and update definition of being “fully vaccinated” to getting a booster.

Sean O’Donnell, a county health official, told councilmembers Tuesday morning that at least one in four county residents have tested positive for COVID since Saturday. More than a quarter of the hospitalizations in the county are for COVID, similar to numbers seen last January, according to county health data.

Last month, Prince George’s County Public Schools announced all schools will go virtual until at least Jan. 14 following the winter break.

This story was updated to include the response from some Montgomery County parents and information about the petition from parents to MCPS and county leadership.