Starting Thursday, 16 Montgomery County public schools will shift to remote learning – the latest disruption in a new year that’s only a few weeks old.

According to a statement from MCPS on Tuesday, the schools will close “in the interest of the overall school community’s health and safety,” and conduct class virtually until Jan. 29.

The schools going virtual are as follows:

Beall Elementary School
Briggs Chaney Middle School
Brookhaven Elementary School
Clopper Mill Elementary School
Captain James E. Daly Elementary School
Gaithersburg Elementary School
Glenallan Elementary School
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School
Lakelands Park Middle School
Neelsville Middle School
Paint Branch High School
RICA – John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents
Sargent Shriver Elementary School
Twinbrook Elementary School
Watkins Mill Elementary School
Whetstone Elementary School

The school system’s announcement did not specify why each school closed, but said that the decisions are made by examining key factors at each school, like student attendance rates, staff absences, and COVID-19 rates in the school, among others.

The county previously used a positivity rate threshold to trigger school closures: if 5% or more of a school’s student and staff population tested positive for COVID-19, the school would automatically shift remote. This guidance prompted the 14-day closure and remote shift of 11 MCPS schools in the first week of the year. (These schools are slated to return to classrooms on Thursday). MCPS Superintendent Monifa McKnight ditched the 5% threshold guidance just a week after implementing it, when 115 schools met that same benchmark. Now, if a school reaches that 5% threshold, it might move remote – but officials say they will review decisions on a school-by-school basis.

McKnight, speaking before the Montgomery County Council on Tuesday, announced the closures and clarified the circumstantial process used to determine shutting down a school. According to MCPS’ COVID-19 dashboard, there are more than 11,000 active quarantined cases among students, and roughly 9,000 active cases among students and staff.

“Sometimes the story cannot be told by looking at just plain numbers,” McKnight said. “For example, one school that has a trend of more than 20% of staff absent may be able to function safely and effectively. Whereas another school may not, depending on who those staff members are, who are able to be in the building and who aren’t, and how that relates to key functioning of a school.”

During the meeting on Tuesday, McKnight requested that the council dedicate resources from the county’s health and human services department to take over the contact tracing process in schools, stating that the reliance on school staff to contract trace takes away from educators’ ability to focus on instruction.

She also asked that the county provide 190,000 rapid kits to the school system, one for each student and staff member.

During a media briefing on Wednesday,  Dr. Earl Stoddard, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer, said that schools cannot be completely removed from the contact tracing process, which he described as a “contact identification” process.

“The person who has the information about who was proximate [to an infected student] is the teacher,” Stoddard said Wednesday. “There is no point where MCPS is uninvolved in this process. Where we can assist — when those teachers identify those number of contacts — is contacting families, and making them aware of the exposure and identifying vaccination status. We can support them in this effort, but there is no jurisdiction where the teachers and faculty of a school are not involved in the contact identification process, because they have the information about exposure points.”

Stoddard said the county would work with the school system to provide more rapid tests, but they’re currently experiencing shipping delays on the latest delivery of 196,000 rapid tests. The county has ordered, in total, more than two million tests, and already distributed 240,000 to MCPS. Of the forthcoming 196,000 rapid tests, Stoddard said the county will work with MCPS to determine their allotment.

As is the case across the country, the virtual shifts have split parents in Montgomery County — some who are outraged at the closures, and others who support shutting down schools, and have called for even greater protections. More than 2,000 parents with the groups Montgomery County Families for Education and Accountability and Coalition of Maryland Parents and Students signed a petition with parents of other states, asking federal, state, and local governments to keep schools open. Meanwhile, more than 1,500 other MCPS parents have circulated petitions earlier this month, calling on county officials, including County Executive Marc Elrich, to implement enhanced safety measures ahead of the start of the new year.