One year after the pandemic started, students in Milwaukee still haven’t returned to classrooms, and a teachers’ union leader is signaling that educators may need to see additional safety measures, beyond vaccinations, in order for them to return.
Milwaukee Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, is holding classes virtually. The district has a plan to phase-in in-person learning next month.
But in an appearance Sunday on “UPFRONT,” Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, would not say whether the union backs the district’s plan to return to classroom learning in April. “UPFRONT” is produced in partnership with WisPolitics.com.
“We have always been in support of being in classrooms, in schools, with our students, when we know that it is safe to do so,” Mizialko said.
Vaccinations for teachers started last week. Mizialko said it has been difficult to track how many MPS teachers have received vaccinations, because some educators are going to their private medical providers for shots.
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Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
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