Boise Schools District Quarantine Trivia Time!!

How many weeks Boise School District has quarantined over 1,000 students since the beginning of the school year?

Answer: D: 50%

7 out of 14 weeks reported thus-far. You read that correctly, HALF of the weeks students have been back to school, over 1,000 of Boise School District's roughly 23.k students have been quarantined due to illness or exposure. That's over 4.3% of students who've been quarantined every week for half of the weeks this school year so-far. In fact, two of those weeks, roughly 7.5% were quarantined.

How many of those students were healthy for some, most, or even all of their quarantine? How many educational hours were unnecessarily missed? How can the district justify excluding over 4% of the student population from quality, in-person education for half of the weeks this semester so-far? How much COVID spread was prevented by these drastic measures? Is it worth the trade-off of excluding so many (potentially healthy) students from school? What will the long term impacts be of such a large portion of the student population missing out on school?

The district is saying they're doing this to keep kids IN school but it seems to be keeping a lot of healthy kids OUT of school.

If CDH still used the transmission color categories they used prior to adopting the CDC categories (read our posts here and here) in late July 2021, Ada County would have just barely been above the "yellow/moderate" color category threshold the week of November 14 (678 diagnosed cases and the former upper limit for the yellow category was 674) and well below that threshold by now. So, the Boise School District's quarantine policy is MORE strict now than it was after mid-February last school year despite more people being vaccinated (some triple vaxxed), the vaccine being available children 5+ and many more people having natural immunity.

Stay tuned for more information and updates on this topic soon and subscribe to our e-mail list!

Please tell BSD, CDH and the Hospitals what you think of their quarantine policy and subscribe to our mailing list! Boise School District

Trustees@boiseschools.org; coby.dennis@boiseschools.org; lisa.roberts@boiseschools.org; Brian.Walker@boiseschools.org; Becca.Anderson@boiseschools.org; Teri.Thaemert@boiseschools.org; Debbie.Donovan@boiseschools.org; Tamara.Fredrickson@boiseschools.org

Central District Health:

boh@cdh.idaho.gov; gina.pannell@cdh.idaho.gov; rduke@cdh.idah.gov; vodell@cdh.idaho.gov

Hospitals:

patientrelations@slhs.org; information@primaryhealth.com; bohswebmaster@stalphonsus.org