Aberdeen Central High School called parents Friday evening to announce that someone in the building tested positive for coronavirus. The school said that anyone who was in “close contact” with that individual will be contacted not by the school itself but by the Department of Health, because, you know, when it comes to public health alerts, we want information to get to us via middlemen in a distant bureaucracy, as slowly as possible.
And as we know, “close contact” is defined as “being within 6 feet of an individual for more than 15 minutes.” so as far as we know, the DOH may look at a seating chart, see that your child is usually ten feet away from the student or teacher who tested positive, and not call to let you know that your child spent 90 minutes in a sealed room with a positive case.
The folks who do get a close-contact/quarantine call will need to stay home for a couple weeks. The number of such quarantines will likely increase right along with the explosive growth in cases that has coincided with the reopening of schools:
South Dakota’s rate of spread of coronavirus is now the highest in the nation, with an Rt of 1.32:
What sort of access to learning will be available to kids and teachers who have to stay home after close contact with a positive tester remains to be seen. Aberdeen’s backup online education plan was designed to serve as a standalone curriculum for students who had the good sense to choose to do the entire first quarter online instead of charging into the predictably contagious classroom. Private vendor Edgenuity provides at-your-own-pace learning that operates completely separately from whatever Aberdeen’s teachers are doing in their classrooms. Students in quarantine can’t simply hop onto a couple weeks of Edgenuity lessons to keep up with what their not-yet-exposed on-campus counterparts are doing. Quarantined Aberdeen teachers can’t use Edgenuity as a platform to deliver their own lessons to students.
Besides, Edgenuity appears to already be overloading the school’s capacity to monitor its users. One Aberdeen school staff member charged with contacting students who are staying home for the quarter and using Edgenuity has to contact 280 students each week. If we guess that meaningful contact might consist of five minutes of reviewing the report on the student’s online progress, calling the parents, and fielding any questions, that’s 1,400 minutes on the phone, or 23.3 work-hours. If the district intends to uphold its promise in the online contract it required parents to sign that “A District staff member will make direct contact with students two times per week…,” that staff member will need to work 6.7 extra hours each week… and that’s assuming that staff member has no other work besides calling, calling, calling.
The school district certainly can’t just give kids placed in quarantine a two-week vacation from schoolwork, especially not under Aberdeen’s block schedule, in which classes last only nine weeks instead of eighteen. It is quite possible that students will cycle in and out of quarantine more than once: a student may return from quarantine hale and hearty and raring to learn, only to spend 15 minutes sitting at lunch with another student who tests positive and end up sidelined again. Four weeks in quarantine is almost half of a nine-week block of classes, far too much to expect normal students to make up when they return.
The same applies to teachers. Suppose each positive test among the student body quarantines one teacher. Get ten positive tests out of 1,300-some students, and you knock out ten teachers for two weeks. Aberdeen was already short of substitute teachers before the pandemic; the pool of subs willing to run toward real danger and able to conduct two weeks of complete lessons, not just babysit, is likely smaller now.
Contrary to Kristi Noem’s wishful thinking, sustaining K-12 education amidst a pandemic that is now hotter than ever in South Dakota is not easy. Schools that didn’t build robust back-up plans ready to launch immediately are going to be in deep trouble within a few days.
The governor’s response at the rotary club meeting in Sioux Falls infuriates me. She speaks as though this spike in cases is inevitable, when by this point in the pandemic we have worldwide a broad range of effective strategies to stop COIVD-19 from spreading. We also have 900 million dollars in unspent CARES package funding we could be spending to spare people the misery of getting this virus. That could be invested in testing, education (wear your mask in public!!!), resources to create safe learning spaces, and much, much more. But instead there is zero political will to protect SD’s citizens, only an insistence that “we knew this would happen all along” and a sit-on-your-duff approach to “managing” the pandemic, while other states’ citizens get to benefit from proactive government strategies to reduce the incidence of COVID-19 in their communities and are seeing starkly falling rates of infection.
“Inevitable” means there’s nothing that could have stopped it, so we can’t hold any bad results against her or Trump or anyone else in office. “Inevitable” is code for affirmation of Noem’s do-nothing, let-God-sort-’em-out, don’t-interrupt-my-rodeo approach.