Hamilton County Schools

Important message about Hamilton County Department of Education data

Data complications

HCDE currently reports the monthly total for student and staff cases as a percentage of the student/staff population (eg. 0.01%). Computing the precise number of cases from this percentage requires:

  • sufficient precision (significant digits) of percentage data

  • total student and staff population

On two occasions, the total staff monthly cases percentage decreased over the course of a day, with no explanation.

During the first few days of a given month, HCS often adds case data to the previous month's total. This could be due to a reporting backlog, although HCS has not stated a reason. Because HCS does not report daily new cases, these cases are shown on the last day of the month on the charts below.

Computation assumptions

Because HCDE is not making the population data explicitly available in their data reporting, the following assumptions are being used for case data computations:

  • total student population: 44,376 (based on 2018-2019 school year, source: Tennessee Department of Education)

  • total staff population: 5,682 (based on computations from HCDE case data)

Implications

Consequently, student total case data has an approximate margin of error of ±2. Because daily new student cases are computed from tallies of total cases, that metric is also affected.

Data needs

To solve this problem, HCDE could simply report this data in an easier-to-digest fashion :

  • Daily New Cases, stratified by students and staff

  • Total Population, stratified by students and staff

Cases

Active cases among students by day


New cases in school-aged children in Hamilton County by day

This chart shows daily new cases among Hamilton County residents age 5-18 and the 7-day average. HCS aggregates their student case reporting by month and percentage of students. Additionally, their reporting of monthly cases has been intermittent. These reporting deficiencies make it difficult to obtain daily counts of cases among HCS students. Although this chart includes cases among all school-aged children in the county, it serves as a proxy. Source: TDH

Active cases among staff by day

New cases among students by month

New cases among staff by month

Quarantined Close Contacts

Quarantined students

Note: Student quarantined close contacts data reporting began 19 Aug 2020.

Quarantined staff

Note: Staff quarantined close contacts data reporting began 13 Aug 2020.

School Closures

The following visualizations are intended to be a time-series record, not announcements of school closures—refer to the HCDE website for that information. Reporting of building closures for cleaning and contact tracing began on 13 Aug 2020. HCDE reports this data twice on weekdays and only includes buildings closed during the instructional week. Some data on 14 Aug is gathered from a Times Free Press report.

Note: This table may be easier to read on desktop browsers.