The Iowa Department of Public Health and the Governor’s Office have created a new feature on the state dashboard for tracking COVID-19.

Greene County Public Health Director Becky Wolf says there is a percentage of positivity analysis for school districts. It is information regarding an individual school district including the number of school buildings and counties that the district covers, as well as the positivity rate for every county. This is in response to the positivity threshold levels that Governor Kim Reynolds established for when school districts can apply to the Department of Education to do online learning. 

The main trigger point for a school district to do building-wide remote learning is at least 15-percent. Wolf gives her reaction to these established levels.

“There’s no magic answer to this thing. I feel like we might be letting it too high before we decide that we’re going to go totally online. But maybe as we move into this – like everything else that’s happened with COVID – it’s all changing, ever changing.”

However, Wolf believes kids in the Greene County and Paton-Churdan school districts need to go back to school.

“They need socialization, they need some structure of education, they need to get back to being with their friends, however that might be. So I just think that’s really important.”

According to the state dashboard, the Greene County School District consists of two counties – Greene and Boone – as well as three school buildings (all in Jefferson). As of Friday, the state dashboard had Greene County as the lowest positivity rate in Iowa at 1.1-percent.