It pains me to put these words on paper but the undeniable truth is DCPS is not doing all it can to keep its staff and students safe and has gone with an “it’s better to be lucky than good” strategy.
Let me tell you about my personal experience with their contract tracing.
Last week a colleague went out on a Monday not feeling well thinking it was probably allergies. They went to the doctor who also thought it was probably something fairly benign but since they did have some COVID symptoms, there is a lot of overlap with colds, flu, and allergies, they should have a test just to be safe.
Three days later when the results came back, unfortunately, it turned out they were infected. What did we do in the meantime? Absolutely nothing. Everyone who had been around them carried on as if it was business as usual. As infuriating as that was, what we did next was even worse.
The staff has to cover classes like never before. When the superintendent over the summer said we had 2000 ready to go, she was at best wildly inaccurate. So schools have either been splitting classes up or creating sub-teams. My now sick colleague was part of a sub-team that went to a resource one day to help cover.
So when the district did its contact tracing they checked the room that she was usually in all day every day and the room she was just in part of one day. Mind you now this person has been out four days and the district only found traces of COVID in the resource room.
So instead of quarantining the staffs of both rooms they just quarantined the staff of the resource room, but none of the kids that go into that room every other day, which would have been at least four different classes on multiple occasions, including mine twice, since the staff member first felt ill. They did practically nothing to the class that she was in every day, all day, except for that one period, THAT ONE PERIOD, that they were in because they were part of a sub-team.
Now they did quarantine two of the students in the staff members room and three in the class they helped to cover that one day, and I was told it was because they did not wear masks, which is an entirely different and reckless issue. When I asked about my three students who either don’t or won’t wear masks, who were in the class where the COVID was found, I was told that the information would be passed along, which is maddening because now we are almost a week from the first showing of symptoms and maybe three weeks from the initial infection. However, friends, it gets even worse.
One of the resource staff that was required to quarantine, you know because she was in a room where traces of COVID was found, is married to another staff member, who was at school and just as confused about the process as all of us were.
Did I mention that this is the second time people going to or in this particular resource have been required to quarantine because there is that too?
I just want to say I am not mad at my school administration who have had their hands tied or my colleagues, we are all doing the best we can. It’s the district with their feckless and inconsistent policies that has me both infuriated and scared.
So to sum up, nothing has been required of my children who were in the infected room multiple times, nor the majority of the children who worked with the infected staff member. Only two resource instructors and five maskless children have been sent home and the reason apparently is DCPS is not interested in keeping us safe and instead only manifestly cares about keeping butts in seats.
This is not an isolated incident either. You can see all over social media how teachers and students are out, and it’s not being reported and unless something happens during school hours’ contact tracing is kept to a minimum.
Somewhere along the way, DCPS decided it is better to be lucky than good and I will be honest, we are doing better than I thought, but somewhere along the line that luck will run out.
What we are doing is reckless and that is the bottom line.
