EDITORIAL: District must be upfront about COVID stats

It would be charitable to say that Jesus Jara has been getting a lot of awful advice lately.

Last month, Mr. Jara, superintendent of the Clark County School District, pushed through the School Board a misguided plan to dumb-down grading standards for students. On Thursday, he opted for secrecy over transparency when it comes to releasing district COVID information.

Accountability clearly isn’t high on Mr. Jara’s list of priorities.

The academic year is barely two weeks old, but already several local schools have faced virus issues despite mask mandates. One elementary school has switched to distance learning for the near future, but the details of what prompted the decision are murky and Mr. Jara offered no clues last week. On other campuses, parents have reported anecdotal incidents involving quarantines and contact tracing.

Yet Mr. Jara now takes the position that he has some legal obligation to keep COVID statistics as close to the vest as possible. The superintendent said the district will not provide the numbers of students or employees who are forced into quarantine. Nor will statistics be released on a school-by-school basis. The only statistics currently available are the total confirmed case figures for the district overall, which has reported 408 positive COVID tests this month.

Meanwhile, the district has yet to comply with a Review-Journal records request for confirmed case numbers and quarantine data at individual campuses.

“We’ve got to be really careful,” Mr. Jara said, “protecting individual cases.”

But that’s a straw man. Nobody is asking for the names of individual students, teachers or support staff who have tested positive for the disease. “I can’t understand how releasing aggregate data that would help people understand what is happening has anything to do with privacy,” said Richard Karpel, executive director of the Nevada Press Association.

Indeed, parents deserve to have the facts about school outbreaks so they are best positioned to make informed choices. At the same time, public officials such as Mr. Jara owe the taxpayers the facts so they may render their own educated judgments about the performance of those they have entrusted with significant authority.

Perhaps the largest failure of the pandemic has been the inability of public health officials locally and nationally to instill trust and confidence through transparency and clear explanations for specific recommendations and actions. Now Mr. Jara opts to roar down that bumpy road just as the school year begins? What is he thinking?

District officials have had months to prepare for potential outbreaks during the nascent school calendar. They’ve also had months to devise a plan to ensure that parents and local residents remain updated about virus conditions in local schools. Yes, Mr. Jara is in a difficult and unprecedented situation. But he makes matters only worse by cloaking school virus statistics in secrecy rather than ensuring that the district is open and forthcoming about conditions on its campuses.

One of the new grading “reforms” that the Jara regime has inflicted on teachers is the so-called “minimum F,” under which students may not score worse than 50 points out of 100 on an assignment even if they barely do any work. If Mr. Jara fails to reverse course on his foolish COVID information policy, even that exercise in grade inflation may not be enough to salvage his report card.