Rise in flu and other illnesses forces some Central Texas school districts to close

WACO, Texas (KWTX) – As flu cases spike across the country, Texas is seeing a positivity rate almost 10% higher than the national trend, according to data from the CDC and Texas Health and Human Services.

Here in Central Texas six school districts have already cancelled school for the remainder of the week because of this.

In just the last few days Mount Calm, West, Gholson, Moody, Rogers and now Hallsburg ISD have all announced they’re closing to hopefully stop the spread of flu and other illnesses in their schools.

Gholson ISD superintendent Heather McCartney says they made the call this morning after attendance this week quickly declined.

“Today we’re at about 76% for students, and then total staff that have been sick or are beginning to have some symptoms is about 31%, and so for a small school like us it’s pretty significant,” McCartney explained.

But even larger districts like West ISD are dealing with the same issues. Superintendent David Truitt says in just two days the number of students absent out of 1,294 jumped from 141 to 218, with 36 staff members out just yesterday.

And McCartney says her school district saw a nearly 10% decrease in attendance from yesterday to today. “We’ve seen cases, but it doesn’t seem to be at this level,” she shared.

And while Waco ISD hasn’t had to cancel school, their health services director, Rhiannon Settles, says they’re also seeing a lot of illness right now.

“What we’re seeing is expected,” Settles said, “it does seem like our flu numbers are a little higher than normal, but that’s a trend that we’re seeing across the state and across the country.”

According to Waco ISD’s maintenance director, Alex Villanueva, they are constantly monitoring the type and number of illnesses in their schools in order to prevent outbreaks like this.

“If it reaches a certain percentage of any type of disease then we go into the campus and we do a deep cleaning in those classrooms that are affected,” Villanueva explained.

Districts that have closed have said over the next few days crews will be disinfecting and thoroughly cleaning every facility.

“Just deep cleaning of everything,” McCartney said, “desk, chairs, pretty much anything a student touches.”

But in order to help stop the spread, Settles reminds anyone feeling sick to just stay home.

“We ask parents to keep their students home if they are sick,” she said, “so if they’re running a temperature over 100.0, if they’re having any vomiting, diarrhea, or just maybe not acting like themselves.”

School districts closed shared that this will also give everyone affected time to recover so that they can all hopefully return back to school Monday healthy and safe.

“It’s just a hard time we’ll have to get through and get on the other side of it,” McCartney shared.

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