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Buckeye school districts holding COVID-19 numbers low

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School districts in the Buckeye area put together and revised COVID-19 mitigation plans this summer as the delta variant of the virus became a concern in the valley.

So far, in the first several weeks of the school year, the Buckeye Union High School District and Buckeye Elementary School District 33 have been able to minimize the presence of COVID-19 on campus.

The Buckeye Union High School District has about 5,300 students. Youngker High School’s enrollment is about 2,000, with about 1,760 at Buckeye Union and 1,300 at Estrella Foothills.

District data shows there were seven new student confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the week leading up to Sept. 7 at Buckeye Union High School. There were three confirmed positive tests among staff at that site.

Also within the high school district, Youngker High School had five student positives. There were three positive tests among students at Estrella Foothills and one at the Student Learning Center.

There were no staff positives that week at any of those three facilities.
Since the start of school in early August, Buckeye Union High School has had 26 student positives and 11 staff, followed by Younger (25 students and two staff), Estrella Foothills (20 students and two staff) and the Learning Center (six students and one staff).

District Superintendent Steve Bebee said a decision was made to not include quarantine numbers on the high school district’s dashboard, which can be found here: buhsd.org/c_o_v_i_d-19/guidance_and_dashboard

Bebee said with all of the students and staff at an American high-school-only district eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, quarantine after exposure to COVID-positive people is not CDC-recommended for vaccinated people.

The Buckeye Elementary School District 33 has about 5,200 students and about 650 staff, according to its website, besd33.org.

The K-8 district had nine new cases in the week leading up to Aug. 30 at Jasinski Elementary. There were six cases at Bales Elementary and newly opened John McCain III Elementary.

The nine new cases at Jasinski and the six new cases at McCain each only represent 0.011% of each school’s campus population of enrollment plus staff.
There were four new cases at Inca Elementary, followed by two each at Buckeye and Sundance schools. There was one case at both the district’s preschool and at its central office.

There were no new cases this week at the Jasinski Preschool or at Marionneaux or WestPark schools.

For the school year, Jasinski has had 27 cases, followed by Inca (12), McCain III (12), Bales (11), Marionneaux and Sundance (10), Buckeye Elementary (9), WestPark (4), Buckeye PreSchool (3) and Central Office (1).

BESD’s dashboard shows an “under investigation” column, but there was a entry of zero for all campuses as of Tuesday. ,The district does not indicate which positive tests are from students, and which are staff.