La Center High School goes remote due to COVID-19 outbreakFree

The La Center School District has shut down in-person learning at La Center High School following a COVID-19 outbreak involving 10 confirmed cases and scores of exposures.

The district had announced on social media and its webpage Thursday that the school would shift to remote learning starting Friday, due to what it described as a large number of “close contacts” after the number of cases increased.

In a letter Friday afternoon, Assistant Superintendent Peter Rosenkranz said an initial outbreak of five cases discovered earlier in the week had grown to 10 cases as of Friday.

“Based on Department of Health guidelines for close contacts, we would have had to quarantine 163 students,” Rosenkranz said. “Adding in our current absentee rate, we would have had about half of our high school students absent if we had held in-person school today.”

The letter said district officials have been advised to switch to distance learning at the high school until May 24.

“The cases were isolated to a specific population, and we do not anticipate that when we return on May 24, we would continue with the same issues of close contact moving forward,” the letter said.

Teachers were asked to report as normal to school.

Clark County Public Health tracks school outbreaks on its website, but no active outbreaks were listed as of Friday evening.

The website says Public Health reports school outbreaks when there is evidence of virus transmission in the school, in district transportation or in school-sponsored extracurricular locations.