Each COVID case carries new lesson
Guilderland The pleasure of seeing students returning to school was short-lived.
At 3 p.m. on Sept. 18, Altamont Elementary School Principal Peter Brabant learned one of his students had tested positive for COVID -19. Four hours later, he was informed of a second case. The news was instantly passed up the chain of command to Marie Wiles, superintendent of Guilderland Schools, and to the Albany County
Department of Health, which determines how to respond to such crises. School and health department traded calls and emails.
For Brabant, that Friday night could hardly have been longer. He waited to learn what the school must do, which parents would be notified, and what classes and staff might need to be quarantined. But above all, Brabant wondered if the prodigious effort to reopen the schools was about to unravel in a rash of new cases.
“One of the first things going through your mind is, ‘Is this going to be a domino effect? Is tomorrow going to be (a case in) another classroom?,’” he said. “Everyone’s biggest worry is, ‘Are we going to be back in March?’”
He poured himself a pre-mixed Manhattan, and tried to get some sleep.
“That was a bad night,” he said. “Don’t forget, this was day five of school. I think we all thought we would have a week or two to figure out what would happen. I was so sad and disappointed. When the kids came in, they were happy, the days were going well, we were figuring it out. ... Then, Friday night, this happened.”
The next morning, the Health Department questioned Brabant further about how classes were run, the classroom design, what the kids did during the day, when and how often there were mask breaks — all preparatory to contact tracing and notification. Finally, at 2:09 p.m., Jessica Schuddekops, a nurse with the county Department of Health, emailed Brabant with the action plan: Two entire classes would be quarantined, as well as nine faculty and staff members.
It was day two of a difficult stretch for Brabant, his school, the myriad families affected and a community that was left wondering if COVID cases were about to explode and upend months of planning.
With some faculty and staff quarantined, Brabant turned to his roster of substitute teachers to fill the gaps. But they were understandably anxious about re-entering classrooms, uncertain whether the virus was about to erupt. Brabant contacted his list of substitute teachers — three full pages. Not one stepped forward.
So last week, Brabant himself stood before a third-grade class as both principal and sub.
The experience was repeated in the Guilderland High School on Sept. 28 and 30, when two individuals tested positive. Once again, alarms sounded, protocols were triggered, and notifications were sent out. But the high school didn’t quarantine any classes, or notify all parents of classmates that shared classrooms with those who tested positive. The school and the health department had concluded that the cases had been contained.
That response was a far cry from the earlier incident in March, when a single positive case triggered a school-wide shut down.
“Every time we have a case, we get a clearer insight into what the many guidelines we have read mean in practice,” said Wiles, the superintendent. “Nothing is a black-andwhite decision.”
In recent weeks, what is happening in Guilderland has been playing out in school systems across the country, as each tries to cope with a disease that has claimed the lives of more than 214,000 Americans, and infected 7 million. In the last two weeks of July, as schools were about to reopen, nearly 100,000 children tested positive.
The dilemma of who to contact and when to quarantine — and how widely to draw the circle — continues to dog school administrators, teachers, health experts and politicians.
But while the public has become somewhat less shocked by news of positive tests in the schools, the contours of the response by school systems and health departments continues to hold potential surprises for those parents who assume they are owed notification and who expect their child’s classes to be quarantined at the first sign of a classmate or teacher testing positive.
“As a parent, that would be my assumption,” said Theresa Smolen, who has a son in Guilderland High and a daughter in the middle school. “People want to know, especially if it affects your child. They understand the privacy concerns, but at the end of the day, you’re concerned about your family.”
Such assumptions have been the basis for some parents’ decisions this fall whether their children would physically attend class or study remotely from home. But the reality is that neither parental notifications nor classwide quarantines are nearly as straightforward as many parents believe. The simple truth is that their children could well have been in classes or on a school bus with a child who has tested positive, and they will never be told by school authorities or health officials.
That’s because if the guidelines which trigger parental notification and class quarantining are applied narrowly, they focus almost exclusively on the physical proximity to the infected child, teacher or staffer. The school systems, steered by the county boards of health and guided by the latest state guidelines, define “close contact” with an infected individual as being within six feet of the person and exposed for 10-15 minutes within 48 hours of when their symptoms appear.
What that means is that a child who is six feet away for five minutes, or 12 feet away all day, or within six feet for a prolonged period of time of a person who is positive but asymptomatic, may well not set off the necessary chain of events to produce either class-wide parental notice or a quarantine beyond those closest to the infected person. The metrics of notification and quarantine are based primarily on proximity and prolonged exposure, with little regard to the very real potential for transmission through either surface contamination (addressed through cleaning procedures) or aerosolized virus that may hang in the air for hours.
“I don’t know that there is any 100 percent guarantee that you are always going to capture every possible scenario where it can be transmitted,” Wiles said. “If we are going 100 percent, we probably shouldn’t reopen at all — we would go remote.”
Even those who are sent home for two weeks are not required to be tested. In its strictest application, that means the parent of a child who is close to the child who is next to an infected person may well hear nothing from the school and be utterly unaware of the proximity of the risk.
From the outset of the virus, the quarantine and notification provisions employed by the schools have been murky, constantly evolving, and subject to wide discretion within individual school systems. In Albany County, the schools take their cues from the county health department, which in turn takes its guidance from the state, which follows the lead of the federal Centers for Disease Control, which reflects the findings of scientists and sometimes the predilections of the White House — all of which filter down to local schools such as Altamont Elementary and Guilderland High School.
Complicating matters is the fact that, while the broad outline of each of New York 760 school system’s plans has much in common, each has its own distinctive protocols and is subject to interpretation.
Notification and quarantine may be the Achilles’ heel of the back-toschool movement. School administrators, health experts and politicians are forced to navigate a course that optimizes the safety of the children and the community without setting a test so hypersensitive as to spook any effort to resume classroom teaching and any semblance of normalcy. It must also balance the demands of patient and family privacy with the responsibility to notify other parents and the community at large that the virus is in their midst.
Privacy considerations are powerful drivers of decision-making. They explain why neither Brabant nor Wiles will provide any identifying data, and not even confirm that those who tested positive were students, faculty or staff. (For purposes of this article, that information was obtained from other sources.)
There is a second point of concern that may trouble some parents. Even those who are sent home to be quarantined for 14 days are not required to be tested.
That means that children in their immediate proximity who have been exposed will likely not be notified and could continue to spread the virus through the two weeks and beyond during which classmates are quarantined. This is all the more likely given that an estimated 40 percent or more of those infected are asymptomatic.
As long as the question of positive cases in schools was speculative, health officials and school administrators could dodge providing the specifics of their intended response to individual cases or wider outbreaks.
That time has now passed, and the patchwork of responses around the county and the nation is revealing itself.
But even now there is a reluctance by health officials and school administrators to address the issue of notification and quarantining beyond the broader outline. Guilderland Schools COVID Coordinator Neil Sanders referred specific questions to the county health board.
“I am not the one who can respond to that,” said county spokeswoman Mary Rozak, who added that the subject was outside her area of expertise. Health Commissioner Elizabeth Whalen was said to be on the phone with state officials and too occupied digesting the latest guidelines to field a call from a reporter.
Instead, she had the just-released state guidelines texted to the reporter, though they did not address specific questions of notification or quarantine.
But how to reconcile the quarantining of classes and teachers at Altamont’s elementary school in response to positive tests, but not at Guilderland High?
“In the elementary school, it’s hard to keep young kids six feet apart all the time when they are in a single classroom,” Wiles said. “High school kids are better able to socially distance.” In short, notwithstanding regulatory guidelines and numerical formulas defining “close contact,” there is still room for common sense and practical judgment.
“I feel like it’s situationally based in some of the decision-making,” Brabant said of the guidelines. “I think it’s an appropriate thing. I feel like I want more people making decisions on the comprehensive reality rather than simple numbers.”
And Kyle Belokopitsky, executive director of the New York State Parents and Teachers Association, representing some 1.6 million students outside New York City and their parents, gives school systems high marks for their response to the pandemic. “Generally, schools have done a fantastic job in uncertain times,” she said.
Meanwhile, parents and neighborhoods, many in the dark as to who tested positive and from which class, are left to speculate about just how close their loved ones may have come to those who are infected. They are left with little choice but to trust that the schools will tell them when they have a need to know.
In the elementary school, it’s hard to keep young kids six feet apart all the time when they are in a single classroom. High school kids are better able to socially distance.”
Marie Wiles, superintendent of Guilderland Schools