KATY, Texas — Cinco Ranch High School senior Elijah Gonzalez hopes remote learning is permanent history when he returns to campus next week.
That's when the district begins in-person instruction for students who choose to come back.
“I’m at home all day," Gonzalez said. "I prefer being in a classroom where I can actually learn.”
He said he plans to fully abide by Katy ISD’s guidelines to try and keep COVID-19 under control.
"I’ll wear a mask and socially distance and all that," Gonzalez said. "And sanitize my hands. And if I do get symptoms, which I hopefully never do, I’ll stay home and quarantine.”
Gonzalez and his family can now keep better track of how the illness is impacting Cinco Ranch and every other Katy ISD school via a new online dashboard.
It provides the number of self-reported positive cases among both students and staff.
The dashboard also maps those cases down to individual campuses with corresponding alert levels.
"The goal of the database is to provide, you know, timely, accurate information to our families, to our community,” said Jamey Hynds, Katy ISD technology director of business intelligence.
Hynds, who has three children in the district himself, helped develop the dashboard using existing analytics and mapping infrastructure. He said the district decided to go beyond the Texas Education Agency requirement of reporting weekly cases to them.
"It's to the best of the school district’s knowledge, the number of cases that we have actively on campus,” Hynds said.
Houston ISD said it’s exploring the possibility of posting a similar COVID-19 case tracker on its website like a number of other districts have also done based on recommendations from health officials.
“I kind of like to be 100 percent informed about everything going on, and especially if there’s a COVID case on campus,” Gonzalez said.
Cinco Ranch High already had two confirmed cases five days before in-person instruction begins, according to the dashboard.
Click here to view Katy ISD's COVID-19 dashboard.