MIAMI, FL — Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho said Wednesday the district is halting overseas school trips, placing hand sanitizers on buses, making counseling services available to children with anxiety and changing procedures for new students amid growing concerns over the spread of the new coronavirus.

“If there is one place where a contagion can actually spread, it could also be the schoolhouse,”Carvalho told reporters one day after U.S. health officials cautioned that an outbreak of some sort is likely to affect the United States. “Why? Because regardless of ZIP code, they all come together, and then they return back to the community. That is why this set of information, these protocols, these practices, and these preventive measures are so, so important.”

The chief of the nation’s fourth-largest school system — with nearly 400 schools and more than 350,000 students from some 160 countries — said counseling would be available for students who have expressed concern over the new coronavirus.

“More so than an approaching hurricane, which causes stress, kids are concerned about the coronavirus,” Carvalho said, noting the concerns have mostly come from high school students thus far. “They are discussing it in their schools. They are asking a lot of questions. They are worried to a certain extent because of the hype, to a certain extent because of the unknown, and to a certain extent because, quite frankly, they are kids.”

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Carvalho said the district has already canceled one school trip to Italy and a trip to Scotland. The district has had a pandemic emergency plan that was modified for the coronavirus. See also Coronavirus: Florida Should Plan Now For Pandemic

Carvalho said the two schools that have had to cancel overseas trips include Miami Beach Senior High School and John A. Ferguson Senior High School.

The superintendent said the district was creating two registration centers in the north and south ends of Miami-Dade County to process new students coming into the district from areas outside of the United States. He said there have been 50 t0 60 such students in recent days alone.

“We are an immigrant community,” Carvalho said. “The change now is because of this possible threat, the students and their families will no longer be registering the students at any one of the schools throughout the community. We will establish two reception centers to enroll the students as those registration sites.”

Carvalho said the enrollment team at each location will include a nurse. Team members will try to determine whether the students made any stops outside of the United States in areas where the coronavirus has been problematic.

“We find it important at this point to streamline the points of entry, and actually add a health person as part of the team that registers the child, critically important to us,” he said.

Carvalho said the district is also installing hand sanitizers on buses for the more than 60,000 children who ride them every day as well as at entrances to all public schools, cafeterias, gyms and other places where students congregate.

“That is the first point of contact between children and our school system,” he said. “It’s a practice that makes sense.”

In the event that a student comes down with a confirmed case of the illness, Carvalho said, the district would advise the health department and possibly isolate groups or students, an entire school or close the affected school altogether. The health department would be responsible for contacting people who may have come in contact with the affected student.

“We are ready to deploy digital resources, personal devices,” Carvalho said. “We have in excess of 200,000 devices if we have to shut down a school for any reason — and that’s a measure of last resort — or isolate classrooms of students, where they would have to stay home.

“We are able to empower those students and families with devices with digital content so their education continues from a distance with digital content,” he said. “That’s standards-aligned, age-appropriate, grade-level-appropriate.”

He said the district also plans to introduce remote health services to school clinics in the case of a health emergency.

“Part of this game is to eliminate layers, therefore eliminating time-consuming steps,” he said

A spokesperson for the district said the district’s pandemic plan falls under the category of security and was, therefore, exempt from public disclosure.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases acknowledged Tuesday that cases of COVID-19 are appearing without a known source of exposure in Hong Kong, Italy, Iran, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

“As more and more countries experience community spread, successful containment at our borders becomes harder and harder,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier told reporters in a conference call.

“Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country,” Messonnier said. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen, and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”

In Florida, State Surgeon General Dr. Scott Rivkees has stressed there have been no confirmed cases of the illness in the state. Rivkees was scheduled to meet with Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday to discuss the new coronavirus.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez planned to hold a meeting Thursday to discuss the county’s response to the illness.

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