Four schools in south Fulton County will close for an indeterminate period of time, pivoting their students into online classes until COVID-19 community case counts fall.
The schools are in Union City, where the coronavirus infection rate exceeded 1,250 cases per 100,000 people in the last week of August.
“The community spread is so prevalent that we’re just deciding the schools have to be switched remote,” Fulton County Schools spokesman Brian Noyes told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The district on Friday also released a new “mitigation matrix” that dictates escalating mitigation measures as case counts rise over certain thresholds in the many cities served by the school district.
The pivot to online is triggered at 1,250 cases per 100,000 people.
Banneker High School, C.H. Gullatt and Liberty Point elementary schools and the College and Career Academy, which begin remote learning Monday, Sept. 13, will reopen classrooms only after case counts fall below that 1,250 threshold.
“Only through working together as a community can we reduce the impact of the virus and speed the return of students back to the classroom,” read a district Facebook post about the schools closing and the mitigation matrix.
Earlier this week Fulton announced that all students at Bear Creek Middle School in Fairburn were switching to remote learning until Sept. 15. In addition, the third grade class at Summit Hill Elementary in Alpharetta was also to pivot to remote learning this week, and are expected to resume in-person learning Sept. 14.
Fourteen metro area districts documented more than 24,000 cases of COVID-19 in the first few weeks of the school year. Overall, Fulton School district has documented nearly 2,600 COVID-19 cases since the start of the school year, including 675 cases last week. The latest report said 25,465 staff and students had direct contact with another employee or students who tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
Story editor Susan Hogan contributed to this story.
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