Alameda Elementary School

Dear PPS Students, Families and Staff,

With our ongoing commitment to keeping you informed, we have built an improved and more informative COVID-19 Monitoring Dashboard.

Our COVID-19 dashboard provides our community with the number of reports of students or staff who have been asked to isolate or quarantine for the last seven days. Please note that other agencies like the Oregon Health Authority are also keeping count and presenting information about COVID-19 cases in our community; each dashboard is updated on a different timeline and therefore discrepancies may appear between dashboards. 

Here is what you’ll see on the dashboard:

• Isolation Numbers: Individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 or are presumed to have COVID-19. These individuals have been asked to separate from others who are not sick. 
• Quarantine Numbers: Individuals who are asked to separate from others because they have been in close contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive or is presumed to have the virus. 

Our quarantining numbers will be displayed as:

• Off-Site Exposure: Individuals who might have been exposed to or recently have had close contact with someone with COVID-19 outside of school; and
• On-Site Exposure: Individuals who might have been exposed to or recently have had close contact with someone with COVID-19 at a PPS school. 

We have included a daily monitor highlighting the total number of individuals who are quarantining and/or isolating by day. This data will be made available for the entire school district and by school. You will have an opportunity to select a specific time period (“date range”). 

We have also included our vaccination rates for PPS staff. We are proud of our high vaccination rate: 95 percent of PPS staff are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (with 86 percent of staff reporting and an additional 1 percent in the process of completing their vaccinations). 

While the information on the dashboard confirms that the virus is spreading in our Portland community, we know that if we do our part as a school system and as individuals we can reduce the spread. Even as we share this data about how COVID-19 is impacting our PPS community specifically, please know that we continue to monitor and receive regular updates about the changing COVID-19 landscape and forecasting models that determine possible future numbers based on human behavior, vaccination rates, etc.

Thank you again for your patience as we share information that better informs our community. We thank you for doing your part to keep our students and each other safe, and in helping to minimize disruptions to learning. Together—and only together—will we make sure our schools are healthy safe spaces for joyful learning, and that the whole range of important in-person school activities continue uninterrupted all year long.

Thank you.

Jonathan Garcia
Chief of Staff, Office of the Superintendent
Portland Public Schools