A parent and a child affiliated with a Little Rock School District "day camp" at Pulaski Heights Elementary and Middle schools have tested positive for the covid-19 infection, Superintendent Mike Poore said Monday.
As a result, some others affiliated with the school program, which provides child care services for University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences employees, have been quarantined and tested, Poore said. As of late Monday afternoon, Poore said, he knew of no additional positive cases.
News of the positive cases related to the day camp comes just after the district confirmed last week that three district employees had tested positive for the disease caused by the coronavirus that is at the center of a global pandemic.
Poore said Monday that two of those employees work at one site and were preparing for the collection of school property from students here at the end of the school year. The other was a child nutrition worker, he said, declining to give other details about the employees.
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The school buildings in the district and throughout the state have been closed to in-person instruction since March at the direction of Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Schools were closed as an effort to slow the spread of covid-19, which is contagious and potentially fatal -- especially in older people or those with other health problems. Since the end of school-based instruction, Little Rock district employees have been called on to help with the distribution of school meals at designated pick-up sites, the distribution of Chromebooks and other devices for students to use at home, and to staff the day camps for children of health care workers.
Late last week, Poore sent letters to parents of the kindergarten-through-fifth-grade children enrolled in the Pulaski Heights program, notifying them that a parent of two children in the program had tested positive.
In the Thursday letter, Poore said that the two children were not symptomatic and had only been at the day camp one day between April 22 and May 8. The day camp opened April 20. He also wrote that the children would not be allowed to return to the program for 14 days.
On Monday, Poore said that one parent and one child had tested positive for the virus. It was not immediately clear from Poore whether the child is the offspring of the infected parent or from a different family.
"We have worked with Arkansas Children's Hospital and the Arkansas Department of Health to understand how many people needed to be quarantined within those groups," Poore said about the day camp. "One of the things we are really good at ... is tracking which kids and staff are interacting. We keep track of all of that so that in case something does happen, we can identify specifically who needs to go and to get tested."
Poore, who was recovering at home Monday from a weekend fall he suffered while exercising, did not know how many at the day camp have been quarantined and tested but had heard of no additional positive cases.
"There are others being quarantined," Poore said. "I can't tell you where their tests stand -- how many have been tested and how many came back. I've not heard of any other positive cases. But I don't know if that means the tests just haven't come back or that there have been some [negative] test results that have come back."
Metro on 05/12/2020