Virus’s deadly toll on teachers, principals, staff
Deaths of educators has torn at fabric of school experience
MISSION, KAN. >> In July, fourth grade teacher Susanne Michael was ecstatic as she celebrated the adoption of a former student from a troubled home and two of the girl’s brothers. For the festivities, Michael dressed them and her other children in matching Tshirts that read “Gotcha FOREVER.”
By October, the 47-year- old Jonesboro, Arkansas, woman was dead — one of an estimated nearly 300 school employees killed by the coronavirus in the U.S. since the outbreak took hold.
“She just basically would eat, sleep and drink teaching. She loved it,” said her husband, Keith Michael, who is now left to raise the three new additions, ages 3, 8 and 13, along with the couple’s two other children, 16 and 22.
Across the U.S., the deaths of educators have torn at the fabric of the school experience, taking the lives of teachers, principals, superintendents, coaches, a mid
dle school secretary, a security guard. The losses have forced school boards to make hard decisions of whether to keep classrooms open and have left students and staff members griefstricken.
California is among the majority of states that are not publicly reporting school COVID-19 outbreaks. A few groups including a national teachers union have been collecting reports from around the country.
A National Education Association teachers union database of published reports indicates only a single California fatality linked to a school — Glen Nakahara, 61, a music teacher at Jackie Robinson Academy in Long Beach, who also suffered diabetes and high blood pres
sure and died of the disease July 26 after falling ill July 8. His school was closed at the time and it was unclear where he might have gotten infected.
The NEA database indicates a total of 64 reported confirmed school staff cases in California, 71 students and 105 others that were not specified.
Harrisburg Elementary, where Michael taught, remained open after her death, but 14 counselors descended on the school the next morning to help distraught students and teachers.
“I can honestly tell you now, none of us would have made the day if it were not for them,” Harrisburg School Superintendent Chris Ferrell recalled, choking up.
At home, Susanne Michael’s death has been particularly hard for her toddler. “He will just point to the sky and say, ‘ Mama is
up there,’ ” her husband said.
His wife had diabetes, was a uterine cancer survivor and had just one kidney. Therein lies the main challenge of operating schools: While children generally have mild cases or no symptoms at all, about 1 in 4 of their teachers, or nearly 1.5 million of them, have a condition that raises their risk of getting seriously ill from the coronavirus, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In the Bay Area, Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Sara Cody this week told the county Board of Supervisors they have seen a total of 216 cases linked to schools out of more than 29,000 cases to date countywide. Of those, 169 were single cases, and the county investigated 20 others involving two or more cases.
There were only three outbreaks involving three
or more linked cases in students or staff within a twoweek period, she said. One involved three staff members infected on a high school campus where there were no students. Another involved a learning pod that infected two students and a staff member. A third was a kindergarten class where five kids — four of them siblings — and a staff member were infected.
Early research suggested that children are unlikely to contract or spread the coronavirus — an idea that influenced school reopenings in some communities. But Laura Garabedian, a professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, said much of that research was conducted during lockdowns when children were home and testing wasn’t being done on those with mild or symptomless cases.
“I think the key question is whether being at school puts teachers at increased
risk of getting COVID. I don’t think we know that,” she said. But she added: “There are kids who definitely transmit it, and we know that.”
Keith Michael, who is the transportation supervisor for the city of Jonesboro, talked with his wife about the risk of returning to her school before classes started and suspects she might have been infected there.
Through the summer, his wife largely stayed at home, going out mainly to buy groceries. She worked diligently to space out desks in her classroom, according to her husband, though he added, “When you have a full classroom it is impossible to totally socially distance everyone.”
Soon, she was coughing, feverish and vomiting violently. She spent nearly two weeks on a ventilator before a blood clot broke loose and killed her.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has kept count of educators killed by the virus, said the stories “break your heart.”
They include 71-year- old South Carolina first grade teacher Margie Kidd and 53-year- old Iowa special education assistant Jennifer Crawford. Their families said they suspect the two were infected at school.
“I am devastated by the fact that remote education is not an effective substitute. And I want probably as much as anybody else to reopen school buildings for children,” Weingarten said.
“But here is the caveat: You have to have the safeguards that the CDC recommends, and you can’t have a spike going on at the same time. And you have to have the testing, and all of that is expensive.”