One virus case could keep entire school classes home for 14 days

Chris McKenna

| Times Herald-Record

Just one student or teacher testing positive for COVID-19 after Hudson Valley schools reopen could shrink the already reduced numbers of children and teachers working in buildings this fall.

Under virus-containment steps outlined for Orange County’s 17 school districts by the county Health Department this month, every student and teacher who shared a classroom with an infected person must quarantine at home for 14 days.

And if a student who catches the coronavirus has siblings in school, those brothers or sisters also must stay home for 14 days.

What’s more, the classrooms where the infected teacher or student worked could then be unusable for at least a day, since schools are supposed to wait at least 24 hours before cleaning and disinfecting them.

A full-class quarantine likely would have the greatest impact in middle and high schools, with students spending time in multiple classrooms each day.

But it may take weeks for administrators to learn how that policy affects in-school learning in districts that will start the school year entirely online, like 5,000-student Pine Bush School District.

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Pine Bush schools Supt. Tim Mains said this week that all Pine Bush students will learn remotely for at least the first month, and that the district hopes to begin hybrid instruction – two days per week in school, three days learning from home – for elementary students on Oct. 6. No decisions have been made yet about bringing in secondary students because of what Mains said are thorny logistical challenges, such as keeping students six feet apart in hallways between classes.

“We’ve done a lot to limit how often kids are interacting at all,” Mains said.

Keeping the disruption to a minimum

Having to quarantine an entire elementary class would keep home about 10 kids and one or two teachers, he said.

Teachers can teach and students can learn from home while in quarantine, as long as they themselves haven’t gotten sick, Mains said. In that sense, he said, a quarantine would not be that disruptive because it simply would extend the online instruction that schools will conduct a majority of the time anyway.

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“Even the hybrid students are learning virtually 60 percent of the time,” he said.

Furthermore, 37 percent of Pine Bush students are expected to learn from home for the entire fall semester, regardless of when the district offers them hybrid instruction, because their parents opted for fully remote learning, Mains said.

Mains said the district still hasn’t figured out how to clear several distancing hurdles to open the high school, even with it operating at half-capacity with 800 students and 100 teachers. One problem is allowing bathroom breaks for that number of people with only one person allowed in a bathroom at one time. Another is restricting certain hallways to one-way flow.

Contact tracing and privacy

Orange County health officials laid out school quarantine rules and procedures in a question-and-answer format posted on the county website this month.

They say contact tracers working for their department or the state Department of Health will contact all students and teachers who must quarantine once a positive COVID-19 test has been reported. The tracers will use confidential class lists from the schools to make those calls and won’t identify the infected student or teacher.

Any student or teacher who tests positive must stay home in isolation for at least 10 days and provide a doctor’s note clearing them to return to school.

Students or teachers who share a classroom with an infected person are considered to have had “close contact” and expected to stay home for 14 days – the coronavirus incubation period – to avoid spreading the virus if they caught it.

People who had that exposure must remain in quarantine for 14 days even if they test negative for the virus, according to the county Health Department.