Mason City schools developing method to release COVID-19 tracking data to public

MASON CITY — The superintendent of the Mason City Community School District says plans are in the works to start releasing COVID-19 tracking data to the public.

Last week, Superintendent Dave Versteeg said the school district was not able to give an official number of COVID-19 cases within the district, saying it was up to public health officials to decide if any numbers related to schools were to be released. The Cerro Gordo County Department of Public Health director Brian Hanft said his office was going to follow state guidelines and not release that data.

During a workshop session of the school board on Tuesday evening, Versteeg said the district has been working with county health and the Joint Information Center partners in the county on the right way to release that information. “I think we’ve come to an agreement about how to release some tracking dashboard information about how COVID has affected both staff and students. We should have something for that…we have another JIC meeting (Wednesday) where I think we’ll finalize some of the pieces of this…and we’ll start reporting that on September 18th.”

Versteeg says they are looking at releasing information on a weekly basis in an attempt to be as accurate as possible.   “If we feel we try to do it everyday, it might be really almost misleading, because we have to maybe correct somebody the next day that wasn’t…it can go both ways so quickly that we’re trying to figure out what’s the right timing on that, what’s the  actual right thing to report. Is it just the number of people who got ill that day, or is it a running total, or is a percent, or do we roll the average like the state does?”

Versteeg says the biggest thing in reporting the data is to make sure privacy rights are protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, also known as FERPA.  “The piece that we’re for sure going to be consistent about is that this needs to be district-level data and not data that’s too specific to be able to identify somebody. Right now, some of our buildings, if you said there’s one case in this grade in this building, people know exactly who that is. That’s exactly what FERPA is trying to protect people from. Any information that would lead to somebody’s identity. It could be a name obviously, but it could be a statistic that’s so narrow that you can figure out who it is.”

The Mason City Community School District is currently using a hybrid model of classroom attendance, with students attending classes in person two days a week, online for two other days, and having Wednesdays off for teacher in-service.