Keep in mind, there's also time eaten up when school counselors and teachers must follow up about remote learning options for each student who is in quarantine.
Add the hours that tracing is taking away from employees' other tasks and you see why administrators now are on the clock well after many workdays are done.
This strain is being felt all over the region.
At Milford Exempted Village School District, also in the Cincinnati suburbs, spokesperson Wendy Planicka said contact tracing is at times upending full days for the district's principals and assistant principals.
"Contact tracing takes administrators one to two hours per positive case, which includes 'walking' that child's schedule to see which classrooms they were in and if close contact could have occurred in the lunchroom, on the bus, or elsewhere, then the administrators contact those families," Planicka said.
"If we have more than two cases reported in one day, and we've had that happen frequently this year, contact tracing could take up half of their day or more. Our district nurse, Patty Price, works on COVID pretty much the entire day."
Making administrators contact tracers has had another nonmonetary cost. Mason's superintendent, Jonathan Cooper, said contact tracing has taken a toll on the district's culture and how children see administrators.
"You had administrators walking into classrooms and pulling kids out and sending kids home. And so you all of a sudden had this whole dynamic where our administrators, who worked really hard to build those relationships and a safe environment for our kids, and then we were putting them in the position to walk in and pull them out," Cooper said.
The Warren County school system hired a staff member to assist with and organize the district's contact tracing process in January, Cooper said. Other districts across Ohio have done the same, including Cincinnati Public Schools.
"Even with the additional support, quite a bit of time goes into the contact tracing and subsequent notifications each day," CPS spokesperson Krista Boyle said.
The district has ensured each classroom and yellow school bus has a seating chart to reduce the amount of time it takes to identify close contacts, Boyle said.
Akron Public Schools, like CPS, has enforced a universal masking policy since the early pandemic days. Akron schools' business manager, Debra Foulk, said this has led to fewer issues with classroom spread, and that most of the district's COVID-19 exposure is limited to extracurricular activities, like sports.
Contact tracing in Akron's schools is more manageable, too, because the Summit County health department splits the work. School administrators still help with tracking and looking up seating charts, but all communications to families go through the health department.
"Maybe we're efficient at it, but it still is time-consuming," Foulk said. "It is a top priority, it is a communicable class one disease. So sometimes, yes, there are different times when you will put something aside and have to put it aside because you've got to address an issue that just showed up. ...
"I won't tell you that this was easy to put together, we just happen to have a very longstanding relationship with our county health department."
The nationwide nursing shortage has also impacted the process at some districts.
New Lexington City Schools Superintendent Casey Coffey said Ohio's Perry County health department leads its contact tracing, though things are moving more slowly this year because school nurses are not assisting in the process anymore.
“The information at that time (last year) was seamless,” he said. “What we found out now is sometimes it’s very difficult to achieve the same result in a timely manner.”
Is an end in sight?
Schools have been staying afloat by having administrators work overtime, but that won't be sustainable forever.
And forever may be what we're looking at. Eckert, of Forest Hills, said he doesn't know when contact tracing will end.
"My gut is the county will make us do this as long as the CDC believes we're within the pandemic," he said.
Gov. Mike DeWine held a media briefing recently with hospital leaders across the state who say they're seeing a growing number of younger, unvaccinated patients. Health experts say less masking than in 2020 could lead to a "twindemic," with flu season on its way .
Other school leaders are more optimistic. Cooper, Mason's superintendent, is leading the way on a state-sponsored pilot program that could do away with school quarantines entirely.
Whether quarantines persist in schools, most school leaders agree the best way to keep kids safe and in-person is by wearing a mask. A new study from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center shows schools with universal masking policies have fewer COVID-19 cases and fewer quarantines. That means less time spent on contact tracing, allowing administrators to go back to what they are meant to do – run schools.
COVID-19 in Ohio: 32 school districts switched to universal mask requirement in last week
"At the end of the day, we all want the same thing: to put our students in the best opportunity to have academic success, and experience as many extracurricular activities as possible," Jackson Local Schools Superintendent Christopher DiLoreto said.
