DALLAS - At first glance, the latest iteration of the state's COVID-19 case tracker for Texas public schools might be cause for alarm.
Case counts at a dozen of the area's largest districts - including Lewisville, Frisco, Birdville, Richardson and Denton ISDs - climbed by over 100 student cases last week, according to Friday's update.
In isolation, that rise would be significant. That's not the whole story, though.
School closures on Labor Day coincided with the state's deadline for weekly reporting. As a result, 83% of the area's 205 public school districts and charter operators did not report any staff or student cases for the week ending on Sept. 5.
Any unreported cases from that period were to be included into this week's report, according to Chris Van Deusen, the director of media relations for the Department of State Health Services.
Those types of quirks, combined with the weeklong reporting lag of the DSHS dashboard, highlight the difference in utility between the state's data and local COVID-19 trackers updated regularly by school districts.
For example, Frisco ISD backdates each case in its local tracker to the first onset of symptoms, then provides a seven-day rolling average of the total count.
"It helps us keep a better idea of what's happening, as opposed to the state data," Frisco ISD spokeswoman Meghan Cone said.
State officials stress that DSHS's data should be used as a historical reference to provide broad trends, not as a current snapshot of conditions at local schools.