[ad_1]
Only one of the three students eventually tested positive, but as a result of that fear, Milisauskas added another layer of security checks. Previously, the school would take temperatures and the bus drivers would ask students questions about their health before boarding; now Milisauskas also had the students come to the cafeteria upon their arrival, where the school nurse and some of the more careful teachers with Covid, who knew the students well, also looked at these issues, in more detail, everything by evaluating students for signs of illness. Of the handful of teachers who have tested positive at school since September, none have been traced to transmission at school. And less than five quarantined students eventually tested positive, says Milisauskas – although even those students also had other close contacts who were positive at the time, making it just as likely that they caught the virus. outside of school.
As the school year progressed, experiences requiring on-site problem solving became more common, with teachers and administrators forced to scramble to accommodate increasingly positive cases that called for the quarantine of teachers. The State Department of Health was so behind in contact tracing that it hired school nurses to help with the job, many of them calling late into the night. Rather than wait for contact tracers or overworked nurses to help determine who would stay and who not stay at home, schools solved the problem by switching classrooms to distance learning at some. occasions when someone in the class was known to be positive; depending on the number of students needing to be quarantined, the class would resume in person or stay at a distance.
Many days in many schools went uninterrupted; but sometimes, in schools with extended quarantine, what the students were going through did not exactly match anyone’s idea of what in-person learning should be; what is offered to them would best be described as “non-home learning”. At Nathanael Greene Middle School, also in Providence, when there were not enough teachers, the principal, Roy Sermons, sometimes moved two modules whose teachers were in a large gym for a third teacher, sometimes one who was fully part of the virtual program district, could be called in to supervise all the students. In a single space, 30 children zoomed in with one teacher, 30 with another, while the on-site teacher tried to keep tabs on 60 restless middle school students as she also ran classes via Zoom with her own students elsewhere. The union filed a complaint to demand the school be closed for security reasons. The judge dismissed the lawsuit.
In December, a governor’s decree allowed retired educators to replace for more than 90 days without losing their retirement benefits. Even aside from the issue of staffing, the erratic nature of entry and exit to distance learning was, in many classrooms, taking its toll on any semblance of routine. Caroline LeStrange, a teacher at Alan Shawn Feinstein Elementary School on Broad Street, tested positive for Covid on December 2, meaning all of her students were out of school for two weeks. A school gymnastics teacher who rotated five different classrooms was in close contact with someone who tested positive, and the school quarantined all five classrooms pending the results of a Covid test, including that of LeStrange, adding several more days to the number of schools. his first graders failed. Several children in her class had siblings who were exposed to other students or teachers who tested positive, meaning those children missed even more days from school. The students – many of whom were children of immigrants, many of whom qualified for a free lunch – struggled to cope with the rapid schedule changes when they showed up. She could access her students’ computers, watch parents try and fail to connect their students to the required application, eventually tiring of LeStrange’s repeated efforts to walk them through the process in a language they did not understand. . Some days when she tried to lead a Zoom class, only three students showed up. The students who were able to connect online, with the help of the daycare they attended, wrote her notes: “I miss you! I love you!”
Superintendents and their staff were trying to reconcile emerging competing factual patterns for teachers and administrators. For one thing, cases statewide were starting to increase and were not expected to get worse until after Thanksgiving; administrators were exhausted with the stress of scrambling for cover and making quick decisions about whether or not to transform a remote classroom, sometimes the night before families expected to send their students to school. On the other hand, with each passing week the district saw more reassuring evidence that student and teacher transmission was low – and that although teachers were stressed, they were rising to the task and managing to keep up. open doors.
On November 18, with statewide positive test rates of around 6%, Raimondo announced that for a limited period – she hoped for no more than two weeks – high schools could drop to 25% of their capacity from November 30. A few weeks later, Olayinka Alege, an administrator who oversees Providence middle and high schools, received a text from an anxious high school principal at a school with around 1,000 students. “Almost 50 cases, now in the maintenance staff,” he said; the number referred to the total of students and staff who had tested positive since the start of the school year. When the two spoke, the principal explained how much the burden of keeping the school open weighed on him, how responsible he felt: was the fact that the students kept coming was the right thing to do? to do? They spoke briefly, but even then the principal instructed Alege to call back later that night, just so they could review the facts one more time: the high school was safer than ever, now that it was. dropped to 25% of its capacity; they knew that the cases going back to schools were few; they knew that schools provided a structure that protected children from health risks. Alege says he understood that the teacher, like others, sometimes needed that confidence so that he could “put his head on the pillow at night knowing he was doing the right thing for the children.” . The principal’s school, like all the others in Providence, remained open until December 20, when the district temporarily switched to distance learning a few days before the start of winter vacation.
At the end of the first semester, results for Providence students attending school in person were less than ideal: 22 percent of all in-person learners had at least one incomplete in a class. But the number was even worse for virtual learners, 37% of whom had at least one incomplete. School openings were also found to be important to public health statewide: Regular immunization rates fell last spring, but rebounded widely in October, depending, most likely, on the requirement that students should be vaccinated before returning to class. The same goes for lead screenings, which are mandatory for kindergarten attendance.
[ad_2]
Source link