Coronavirus has sickened hundreds of thousands people and killed thousands more in Georgia. (Image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Georgia public schools are grappling with how to host indoor winter sports safely as the COVID-19 pandemic flares up across the state and throughout the U.S.
Fresh off worrying about football season, school districts are prepping to play close-contact sports like basketball and wrestling in gymnasiums, which health experts say pose far greater risk for spreading the virus than outdoor stadiums.
Left largely to decide their own rules, the state’s roughly 180 school districts are taking cues from the Georgia High School Association (GHSA) to give guidance on mask-wearing, keeping safe distances between players and limiting spectators to a small fraction of the fans who normally attend games.
Robin Hines, the GHSA’s executive director, said hundreds of high-school football teams have nearly completed their seasons with only a few games being canceled each week, in part due to COVID-19 measures like limited locker-room interaction for players and fewer fans in the stands.
That success, as well as few disruptions for the indoor volleyball season during the fall, give Hines confidence Georgia’s nearly 3,000 schools will be able to safely hold athletic competitions no matter what punches COVID-19 may throw.
But sports like basketball and wrestling still feel troubling, Hines acknowledged, because closed gyms have diminished air circulation that could create hospitable grounds for coronavirus.
“We feel good about where things have gone so far, but as it gets colder and we move indoors, that’s certainly cause for concern and we’ll take a close look at things,” Hines said. “Everyone’s going to have to measure the risk-reward factor as they go.”
For basketball season, which starts this week, the jump ball has been nixed so that visiting teams take first possession to start the game and a coin toss decides overtime possession. Players on the bench must sit six feet apart, and referees’ whistles will either be electronic or have cloth coverings to block spit from spraying onto the court.
Wrestling matches will see fewer teams competing in the same gym, with dual tournaments to take place in several gyms instead of the usual one site. Sectional tournaments will be eliminated entirely.
Mats should also be sanitized frequently. Bibb County schools, for instance, will have access to a machine that sprays a sanitizing mist on wrestling mats, which takes about 10 minutes to settle and zap away germs, said the district’s athletics director, Barney Hester.
“Anything we can do to help prevent any kind of spread, we’re probably going overboard to do it,” Hester said.
Despite the optimism, public-health experts are wary of the risks indoor sports could pose for Georgia, particularly as COVID-19 cases begin climbing again.
Positive cases have crept back up in recent weeks from a daily average of just under 1,200 cases on Oct. 1 to an average of nearly 2,400 daily cases as of Thursday. Hospitalizations from the virus have also increased this month.
As of Thursday, nearly 400,000 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in Georgia. The virus had killed 8,569 Georgians.
Gyms hosting close-contact indoor sports represent “the riskiest place for spreading the virus to others,” said Dr. Mark Ebell, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health.
The risks are even greater since high-school sports involve younger people who may not show any symptoms of COVID-19, increasing chances they could unintentionally carry the virus home to more vulnerable family members like parents and grandparents, Ebell said.
“I think it would be irresponsible to proceed with these sports, especially with spectators who would often be in higher risk groups,” Ebell said.
At least one school district, DeKalb County, has decided to postpone winter sports indefinitely for the 2020-21 school year, though athletes are still allowed to train, according to a district spokeswoman.
And while wrestling is still on for Savannah-Chatham County schools, district officials only recently reversed an earlier decision to cancel the season over health concerns, a district spokeswoman said.
Elsewhere, many of the state’s largest school districts are crafting plans to reduce the virus’ spread as much as possible this winter, hoping to let student athletes hit the court and the mats with minimal disruption and health issues.
In particular, many large districts plan to ticket fans electronically so they maintain a strict cap on attendance and drastically reduce how many people will be allowed in school gyms.
Gwinnett County Public Schools, the state’s largest district, is poised to cap winter sports attendance at 150 fans — far fewer than the typical 2,300 people Gwinnett’s school gyms typically hold, according to district spokesman Bernard Watson.
Cobb County schools have pledged to shrink gym attendance to 30% occupancy through digital ticketing and pre-issued passes, with families of players, cheerleaders and pep-band members getting first dibs at tickets, according to the district’s new rules.
Macon schools likewise aim to restrict gym attendance to 100 people, way down from the typical 1,000 to 1,200 fans that the larger gyms can pack, said Bibb County’s Hester.
“We’re trying,” Hester said. “But the best you can do may not be good enough in this environment without a vaccine.”
Even with all those precautions, there appears to be little oversight from state education or public-health officials to ensure that Georgia student athletes and their fans do their best to fight off COVID-19 outbreaks while playing sports this winter.
The state Department of Education does not oversee athletics, said a spokeswoman, while the Georgia Department of Public Health intends to send health guidance on winter sports to local schools – though it’s unclear if the agency has actually done so yet.
That lack of leadership could promote a scattershot approach to keeping high-school athletes and their families safe that might contribute to worsening the virus’ spread in the coming months, said Dr. Colin Smith, a clinical assistant professor of health management and policy at Georgia State University’s School of Public Health.
Schools determined to hold winter sports should consider taking more safety measures than many are set to do, such as emulating professional sports by conducting rapid tests multiple times per week and having student athletes commit to limiting their social circles to a small group of people throughout the season, Smith said.
“If we cannot convince people not to do it, there are things we can do to minimize it,” Smith said. “But I think we may be in for some serious problems this winter.”
Democratic President-elect Joe Biden spoke during a campaign stop in Warm Springs, Ga., on Oct. 27, 2020. (Biden campaign video)
A nearly weeklong hand recount of the more-than 5 million ballots cast in Georgia’s presidential election has confirmed a Democratic candidate won the state for the first time since 1992.
President-elect Joe Biden edged out President Donald Trump by 12,284 votes in a general election that drew historic turnout fueled by a huge number of mail-in votes.
The recount, which came in the form of an expanded audit of the results, faced challenges from many Trump allies and GOP leaders in the state who took aim at Georgia’s top elections official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
In a statement Thursday night, Raffensperger hailed the recount as a win for Georgia’s new election system that should instill confidence in the state’s voting integrity.
“Georgia’s historic first statewide audit reaffirmed that the state’s new secure paper ballot voting system accurately counted and reported results,” Raffensperger said. “This is a credit to the hard work of our county and local elections officials who moved quickly to undertake and complete such a momentous task in a short period of time.”
The results are set for official certification on Friday, marking a key step before Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are likely cast for Biden on Jan. 6.
Due to the tight margin, the president can still request a recount that would involve cycling ballots back through tallying machines. His campaign has until early next week to make that request.
Local election workers across the state’s 159 counties have hustled since last Friday to complete the recount as Raffensperger’s office fended off fraud allegations and was forced to deal with the discovery of previously uncounted ballots the recount turned up in four counties.
Biden’s lead over Trump was trimmed through the recount by about 1,900 votes as county workers parsed through ballots by hand and, in some cases, located missing memory cards containing vote counts.
Floyd, Fayette, Walton and Douglas counties had notably high vote changes due to finding memory cards and scanning previously uncounted ballots, prompting the shrink in Biden’s lead in favor of Trump.
Some GOP leaders including Georgia’s Republican Party chairman and Trump himself latched onto the undiscovered ballots as evidence of voter fraud — though top deputies in Raffensperger’s office picked apart those claims in minute detail over the course of several news conferences this week.
The audit marked another key test of Georgia’s new voting machines, which featured paper ballots with a barcode scanner that made the manual recount possible.
Certification of the results now looks all but certain after a federal judge on Thursday denied a temporary restraining order sought by a Trump-supporting Atlanta attorney Lin Wood to halt certification and redo the recount.
Atlanta attorney Lin Wood speaks at a rally for President Donald Trump in Buckhead on Nov. 7, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A federal judge tossed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to block the presidential election results in Georgia from being certified in a hearing that pitted attorneys for a firebrand supporter of President Donald Trump against a surprising tag-team of Republican and Democratic defendants.
The suit, brought by Atlanta attorney Lin Wood, sought a restraining order to halt the results’ certification and compel another hand recount of Georgia’s more-than 5 million ballots, despite the fact a hand recount was done as part of an expanded audit of the results over the past week.
U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg dismissed the case after a nearly three-hour hearing in which he found Wood brought no real evidence or proof that he had been harmed by alleged issues with Georgia’s election system.
“To halt the certification at literally the 11th hour would breed confusion and potential disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law,” said Grimberg, who is a Trump appointee.
Attorneys representing Wood alleged outside monitors were kept too much at arms-length from observing the recount and took aim at a recent legal settlement making it tougher to reject absentee ballots due to invalid signatures.
Citing several sworn statements, Wood’s suit argued the stricter signature-verification rules made it impossible to tell whether mail-in votes were cast fraudulently, prompting the need for a new recount to involve scrutinizing signatures on absentee ballot envelopes.
But lawyers from often at-odds parties representing both Republican and Democratic sides took turns criticizing Wood’s lawsuit at a hearing Thursday, rejecting both its legal merits and framing it as an ominous attempt to disenfranchise Georgia voters.
“The election is over, and rather than accept that his preferred candidate has lost, [Wood] seeks the largest disenfranchisement of eligible electors since the abolition of the poll tax and other vestiges of Jim Crow in the state of Georgia,” said Russ Willard, an attorney representing Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office.
Attorneys for Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both prominent Georgia Republicans, were joined by legal teams for the Democratic Party of Georgia and the NAACP’s Georgia chapter, marking an unusual cast of co-defendants attempting to defeat a Trump-backed suit.
“Your Honor, [Wood] literally seeks to strip millions of Georgians, each one an American citizen, of their right to vote … [and] that’s simply astonishing,” said Kevin Hamilton, an attorney representing the state Democratic Party.
Wood’s attorney, Ray Smith brushed off attacks on the suit as lacking real evidence, arguing in court Thursday that his case “provided a lot of testimony as well as almost 15 affidavits” to show Georgia’s recount was conducted in the shadows.
“We believe we’ve got lots of evidence,” Smith said.
Much of that evidence hung on witness testimony from Susan Voyles, a 20-year election worker from Sandy Springs and active Republican who claimed she counted dozens of mail-in ballots that aroused suspicions of fraud due to their unusually “pristine” condition.
Willard, representing the attorney general’s office, chalked up that testimony as well as the suit’s challenging of beefed-up rules for signature verification set in March as baseless and desperate.
“[The] plaintiff has adopted a scattershot approach … to try to clothes-hook as many constitutional claims as possible in order to get relief,” Willard said.
The judge agreed, noting especially that Wood’s allegations of poor access to the recount for outside monitors was moot since constitutional due-process rights likely do not extend to election observers.
“Monitoring an audit in an election is not a constitutional right,” Grimberg said. “Monitoring an election is not a life, is not a liberty and is not a property.”
Grimberg also cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s admonition for judges not to “meddle” with the power of state election officials to conduct federal elections, particularly when asked to do so by just a single voter like Wood.
The judge did, however, leave the door open for Trump and the Republican Party to join the lawsuit and boost its chances for possible future success, noting the president’s absence in the suit as the losing candidate in the election was “extremely significant.”
“That would have certainly changed the analysis when it comes to standing,” Grimberg said.
Thursday’s hearing came as Raffensperger’s office hustled to wrap up and release results of the nearly weeklong hand recount. Certification of Georgia’s election results are due Friday.
State Board of Education members debate whether to hack down grade weights for year-end test scores to zero in Georgia at a meeting on Nov. 19, 2020. (Georgia Department of Education video)
Year-end standardized tests for Georgia public schools are poised to count for zero this school year after state education officials moved Thursday to lower the weight those scores have on students’ final grades from 20% to 0.01%.
The 0.01% grade weight is the most the annual Georgia Milestones tests can be watered down without running afoul of federal rules requiring schools to administer the tests. Normally, the tests count 20% toward final grades in Georgia.
On Thursday, members of the State Board of Education voted 10-3 to weight the test scores as essentially zero at a minimum, citing the disruptions to education in Georgia resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. School districts could still decide individually whether to increase the grade weights above zero for their students.
The change needs another vote from the state board before it can take effect. It also requires a 30-day public comment period before that vote.
Last month, the board balked at lowering the test scores to zero, choosing instead to set the grade weights at 10% during the virus-impacted school year. But a survey of about 90,000 parents, teachers, students and others in Georgia found around 86% supported the 0.01% mark.
The push to water down the tests came in September after the U.S. Department of Education denied Georgia’s request to scrap the Milestones tests this year, citing the need for schools to keep up data on student performance during the pandemic through the test scores.
Furious over that decision, State School Superintendent Richard Woods proposed reducing the test grades to the 0.01% weight in order to ease pressure on students and teachers already struggling to keep up coursework with online classes and overhauled in-person learning environments.
Woods praised the state board’s decision Thursday to support his proposal, reiterating his belief that students and teachers deserve a break from the test’s influence this school year.
“My position on this has not changed: it is logistically, pedagogically and morally unreasonable to administer high-stakes standardized tests in the middle of a pandemic,” Woods said. “If the federal government is going to continue insisting on the administration of these exams, it is incumbent on us at the state level to ensure they are not high-stakes and do not penalize students and teachers for circumstances beyond their control.”
Many parents, teachers and concerned Georgians turned out to public meetings and sent emails backing Woods’ proposal, arguing some students in high school could risk losing scholarship or college enrollment opportunities without relief from the test grades.
“Our students’ futures are riding on these test scores,” said Teresa Nichols, a 7th-grade math teacher at Northeast Middle School in Tifton. “It could be the difference between a scholarship for college and not going to college at all. I am afraid if we penalize our students this year, the high school dropout rate will increase.”
Several board members said local school administrators should be given trust and leeway to make sure their students take the tests seriously, despite the absence of grade weight.
“We are giving the ultimate flexibility tied to accountability to the school systems if we adopt this,” said board member Martha Zoller.
Others, however, argued gutting the grade weights would render the tests meaningless, eliminating the benefits of measuring performance data this year and incentivizing students to abandon taking the tests entirely.
“We can’t make this a meaningless exercise,” said board member Trey Allen. “I really think our kids deserve better.”
Some board members also questioned whether students who take the tests before a final decision is made in December would be stuck with the original 20% grade weights, though state officials indicated those weights would be changed if the board ultimately adopts the 0.01% amount.
Lines were sparse outside the Cobb County Regional Library voter precinct through noon on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Election officials in Georgia are poised to wrap up a statewide hand recount of the 2020 presidential election Wednesday night after days of fending off unfounded fraud allegations and wrangling in some counties that located previously uncounted ballots.
County election workers across the state have hustled since last Friday to re-tally more than 5 million ballots all by hand in an unprecedented effort to audit results from the first presidential contest in nearly three decades to be won by a Democratic candidate in Georgia.
By late Wednesday, President-elect Joe Biden held a lead in Georgia over President Donald Trump by 12,781 votes, a margin that had shrunk by 1,375 votes over the past week as uncounted ballots were found in Floyd, Fayette, Douglas and Walton counties through the recount.
With the recount underway, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his top deputies have batted down unproven claims of election irregularities brandished by Trump and his allies, ranging from ballot harvesting and dead voters to unverified signatures and late-arriving absentee ballots.
Raffensperger has been caught in the crossfire within his own political party as Trump and many of his supporters blasted the state’s Republican elections chief, who in turn claimed a top U.S. senator allegedly pushed him to trash lawful mail-in ballots.
Raffensperger’s office set a deadline for counties to wrap up the recount by midnight ahead of a separate deadline Friday for the state to certify the election results, marking the next step in a process to have Georgia’s 16 electoral votes likely cast for Biden on Jan. 6.
“We feel good about where we stand right now,” said Gabriel Sterling, voting system manager for the secretary of state’s office. “I’m prayerful that we can get through this and we can find a way to have everybody at the end of the day … have faith in the outcome of the election regardless of how it came out.”
Nearly all of the state’s 159 counties either had no difference between their ballot counts on election night and after the audit, or their counts differed by only a few ballots due to small human-error mistakes during the hand recount, Sterling said in a news conference Wednesday.
Twenty-one counties still needed to finish counting and complete quality-control procedures Wednesday including several larger counties like Fulton, Gwinnett and Chatham, as well as the four counties where officials located around 5,800 previously uncounted ballots.
Of those, Walton and Douglas counties each turned up just below 300 additional ballots after workers did not initially upload memory cards to store the vote counts. Walton’s added votes went for Trump by a 176-vote margin, while Douglas’ ballots increased Biden’s lead by 28 votes.
Fayette County, which located 2,755 ballots, also did not initially upload a memory card. Those ballots trimmed Biden’s lead by 449 votes in favor of Trump.
In Floyd County, 2,524 early-voting ballots could not be scanned late last month due to a technical issue and went unnoticed at the county elections office until the recount, cutting Biden’s lead by another 778 votes. Raffensperger has called for Floyd’s elections director to resign.
In all, adding the uncounted ballots to the 5 million-vote pile trimmed Biden’s original lead from 14,156 votes to 12,781 votes, giving the former vice president a close but comfortable advantage as state officials work to certify the final results by Friday.
“The process worked,” Sterling said. “We were able to find those votes and get them in the mix. People should have even better faith in the process.”
Even so, Trump allies including Georgia Republican Party leaders, Atlanta attorney Lin Wood and outgoing U.S. Rep. Doug Collins of Gainesville have slammed Georgia’s election system and cast doubt on the recount’s accuracy in recent days.
In particular, Wood sued Raffensperger and the State Election Board last Friday to have a federal judge block Georgia’s election results from being certified, alleging state officials improperly signed an agreement in March to change rules for verifying voter signatures on mail-in ballots.
Raffensperger has called the lawsuit’s claims “basically nonsense,” noting the same rate of absentee ballots were rejected due to invalid signatures in the Nov. 3 general election as during the 2018 midterms. He argued his office had tightened rules on signature verification since 2018, not watered them down.
In interviews with several media outlets this week, Raffensperger has also alleged U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. – a top Trump ally – suggested he throw out all mail-in ballots in counties with high amounts of invalid signatures. Graham has denied making that suggestion.
“In this state, voters cast their ballots in secret so that no political party or candidate can ever intimidate or threaten a voter into changing his or her vote,” Raffensperger said. “We will continue to protect the integrity of the vote.”
