I’m involved on working on the plans for our school. We are hoping for a combination hybrid/face to face, with a fully remote option available for the small percentage of our families who have said they need/want it, but it will depend on the governor. My current intention is to send my child back. I have a lot of confidence in the medical professionals who are advising us and the procedures we are creating as a team, and no one in our household (or that we see regularly) is high risk. We are a small school with good resources and a community that will take it seriously. We are also in an area where things got a little bad, but cases have been and stayed low for some time now. If the situation locally changes again, the whole school will move to remote, and I support that too.
I do want to clarify - there are a lot of people saying things along this lines of “if one HS teacher tests positive, 120 kids could all be quarantined” “One art teacher could mean four whole grade levels quarantine” That’s not really how COVID-19 contact tracing is currently working. Per the CDC, the guidelines are:
“For COVID-19, a
close contact is defined as any individual who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 2 days before illness onset (or, for asymptomatic patients, 2 days prior to positive specimen collection) until the time the patient is isolated.”
We have been told by the infectious disease experts that proper PPE also affects defining “exposure”. So according to our local health department (could be different where you are!) if a teacher tested positive, but was masked and/or distanced at all times in the building, people would potentially be notified of a positive test in the community, but no one would be specifically told to quarantine. If, however, that person took off their mask in the teachers lounge and sat and had lunch directly across a small table from another teacher, that person WOULD need to get tested and quarantine, and potentially other people in the room if they were within 6’. Either way, everywhere the teacher had been would be sanitized. Obviously in order for this to work, you’d need space and resources to be properly distanced, community members who were diligent about PPE and distancing, and a whole lot of other criteria in place. So I don’t argue at all with schools who don’t feel it’s doable in their situation. I have taught plenty of places where I don’t have confidence that they could go back safely. Sadly, those are also the places where the students most need the support and services of the schools. It’s all such a mess.
