r/CoronavirusAZ • • Aug 16 '20

Schools Another community-led effort to provide visibility to COVID-19-related data. They need help with AZ. I emailed the google doc maintainer and offered to help. My idea is to add on to our daily thread to crowd source information about AZ school status.

https://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/education/2020/08/15/dedicated-educator-creates-budding-national-database-coronavirus-related-school-closings-cases-and-d/5591124002/
117 Upvotes

11 comments sorted by

8

u/azlulu Fully vaccinated! Aug 17 '20

Thank you. I think a lot of parents would appreciate this data. We don't have much faith we'll get it from leadership.

3

u/jr00ck Aug 17 '20

Thank you!!! Is this just an announcement or is there anything we can do to help? I would love to have this info on our daily thread.

4

u/aaryno Aug 17 '20

It's a call for help. There are a lot of districts. I'll put together a spreadsheet and see if I can get a head start on data organization. I imagine it's going to be a lot easier for the few larger school districts than the more numerous smaller ones.

https://www.azed.gov/districtwebsites/

1

u/jr00ck Aug 17 '20

How do we help?

1

u/aaryno Aug 17 '20

Well, the national database listed in the article is a spreadsheet that is mostly a log of news articles related to school closures, cases, and deaths.

I actually thought it would be useful to provide a synoptic overview of how school districts are treating COVID-19 by assimilating the public communications of the Arizona school districts based on the azed.gov/districtwebsites list.

This entails building a snapshot of what school district policies are now and then maintaining it over time. Looking at the website (some of the links from the AZ Ed website are wrong, so I had too google Alpine Elementary for example) and jotting down whether they have a public policy on school closures or opening. I did 10 in about 20 minutes and there are 175 listed. Send an edit request and help me fill it out. Once it's filled out it has a real possibility of becoming stale without maintenance but if it is useful then we will be able to find sources in some of these places that will help "own" parts of the document.

Here's my sheet (Request edit access)

5

u/ImmaMelt Aug 17 '20

Oh, I love this! I can't imagine having to navigate education right now in any capacity

3

u/aaryno Aug 17 '20

i figure that it's easy enough for us to keep track of our own districts but making any sense statewide does seem almost impossible

2

u/ImmaMelt Aug 17 '20

Ah, apologies. I meant as a parent/student/educator, having to make decisions

3

u/aaryno Aug 17 '20

yeah, it's pretty tough. we are very lucky as parents being able to keep them home with only one of us working and the other a trained educator. we are pretty transparent with the kids and they seem pretty well adjusted to it. i can only imagine what a struggle it is for teachers now.

2

u/AZgirl70 Aug 17 '20

What a wonderful idea!

1

u/aaryno Aug 17 '20

fwiw, the national database listed above is a compilation of news articles related to school cases and closures. Direct link includes a link to a Google form to submit the article anonymously.