In much of the South, public school has been back in session for weeks. School admins are already implementing in-person, hybrid, and virtual learning while simultaneously navigating flareups of COVID-19 in their classrooms.

When a student or faculty member tests positive for COVID everything pauses. It takes time and resources to determine who's been near the COVID positive patient and who now needs to quarantined for the next one to two weeks.

Administrators can accomplish the task manually, by pulling schedules and going to each class and sorting through who sits next to who. Or they can work through a clunky SIS (Student Information Systems) interface and try to determine who may have been exposed. But SchoolStatus customers have a much more efficient tool. Over the past couple of months the K-12 software company built-in contact tracing and quarantine reports that can be generated with the click of a button.

"We just want to give them a place to start," says SchoolStatus CEO Russ Davis. "The key is to get the students out of class as quickly as possible."

SchoolStatus already works with school districts in a dozen states. Their software integrates with existing SIS and harnesses that data in a user-friendly way. They also have a robust communications tools that connect millions of teachers to parents each day.

Davis says that adding a contact tracing and quarantine tools just felt like the right thing to do. Schools can now click a button and build a report that shows who has a class with a COVID-19 positive student. They can also click another button when a student needs to quarantine and that generates a report on when students should return to school.

"Basically, it's a central clearinghouse to store this information to store this data. As opposed to keeping sensitive health data in a large Google spreadsheet," says Davis. "So not only do you have a place to find the students who should be quarantined but have a place to store their quarantine information."

Davis says the information is also logged and recorded, so you can see who's looked at it and when.

To hear our full conversation with Davis and learn more about how SchoolStatus is helping districts navigate COVID-19, listen to Episode 166 of Class Dismissed. You can listen to the latest episode of Class Dismissed on your favorite podcast app or iTunes.

You can also learn more about the SchoolStatus contact tracing toolkit here.

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