LOWER MERION TWP., Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — At least eight classmates at a Lower Merion elementary school have tested positive for COVID-19, as well as two fully vaccinated family members. Officials are investigating the school building's HVAC system as a possible culprit in the spread.
An outbreak started in a second grade class at Penn Valley Elementary School on April 15, with a student testing positive for the coronavirus, according to school district spokesperson Amy Buckman. The class was quarantined, she said, "until we could regroup with the county health office, really look at the cases, look at the contact amongst the kids, and decide what the next steps would be."
She said this case has been very peculiar.
"Our nurses did what they usually do, which is to do contact tracing. And as a result of that case, there were five students in the classroom who were quarentined as a close contacts," Buckman said.
Then, she said, two additional second graders in that class tested positive.
"This is the first time out of the 258 student cases that we had in our district since September that we had this many students in one classroom testing positive," she said.
She says they believe to spread was contained to one classroom. They went beyond contact tracing to determine what caused the spread.
"We sent our operations staff into the classroom in question. They really began looking at anything that could have contributed to this outbreak," she said.
That's when they found a problem with the heating, ventilation and cooling system. Buckman says their inspection showed it only allowed only about 30% of the amount of the fresh air that should have been delivered to the room.
She says district employees have since worked to fix the issue.
The district is still investigating the outbreak, and they are not yet pinning the spread on the ventilation system.
Officials say, in addition to a deep clean of the classroom and a test of the HVAC system, they will also do air quality assurance tests of all of the district's buildings.