Your child’s classmate or teacher tests positive for coronavirus. What happens next?
When the state Board of Education issued guidelines for reopening Illinois schools, it cautioned administrators to make plans for “when” — not “if” — COVID-19 shows up in their districts.
Still, ISBE is encouraging districts to prioritize in-person learning this fall, while also keeping students and staff safe. Meanwhile, the outlook for the pandemic remains hazy, if not bleak.
COVID-19 rate in Illinois for those ages 10–19 is at a record high, said Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, last week. NBC Chicago reported that between June 1 and July 7, there was one day where cases for those ages 10–19 surpassed 100. Between July 8 and 15, seven of the eight days had at least 100 cases each for children.
Even with cases climbing among children and teenagers, a single infected person probably won’t cause a school to close or send classrooms full of children into quarantine.
According to state guidance and preliminary reopening plans from some metro-east districts, once the classroom is sanitized, students could immediately return to their seats and teachers could immediately return to their lessons.
The school day would move forward.
As districts start to share their earliest public versions of what education during a pandemic looks like, building-wide closures and cleared-out classrooms aren’t always laid out as part of the plan. Instead, they’re planning to look only at the people who might have been in “close contact” with the positive individual.
“Close contact” is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as being within 6 feet of someone with known or suspected COVID-19 for 15 minutes or more. Guidance from the Illinois State Board of Education and Illinois Department of Public Health requires students and staff wear masks and social distance when possible.
When to quarantine
There are some districts saying they plan to dismiss or quarantine larger groups, in the instance of a positive case. During a school board meeting Monday, Signal Hill 181 Superintendent Kelly Bohnenstiehl said if there were a positive case, the building would shut down for at least a day.
Mascoutah 19’s return-to-learn plan states that “classroom, grade level, school and potentially district-level dismissals due to COVID-19” may be anticipated.
Some of the metro-east districts that have released plans — including O’Fallon 203 and Belleville 201 — say they will keep buildings at half-student capacity specifically to allow for social distancing. This will be done with staggered scheduling, they say.
If students and staff are social-distancing in the classroom and districts have plans to avoid congregating at lunch and in the halls, there’s theoretically no point where close contact should occur. So if a student or teacher tests positive for the new coronavirus, it doesn’t mean their entire class will be sent home to quarantine, according to some districts’ plans.
“Those students in the classroom will not be required to self-quarantine,” O’Fallon 203 Superintendent Darcy Benway said in a board meeting July 10. “We’ll need to monitor them for symptoms.”
In response to follow-up questions, Benway said in an email that the St. Clair County Health Department will provide direction in the case of someone testing positive.
Reporting an outbreak
In O’Fallon, hallway passing and lunch times were identified as the times when students are most vulnerable to exposure to the coronavirus. To encourage social distancing, lockers will not be used and students will attend school for only half the day, taking a “grab-and-go” lunch to eat at home, instead of in a cafeteria.
The District 203 School Board is expecting to approve a final version of that plan at the end of the month.
Jeff Dosier, outgoing superintendent of Belleville 201, also said the district would take direction from the St. Clair County health department to determine who would need to be contacted if someone tests positive.
“We would follow up just like we do now with any positive COVID cases, and then get in touch with any of their contacts,” said Barb Hohlt, executive director of the St. Clair County Department of Health. “If there’s an outbreak, we’ll make people aware.”
Two cases, which could include a probable case, constitute an outbreak, Hohlt said.
For comparison, other public buildings have closed completely when staff tested positive for COVID-19. East St. Louis City Hall closed last week when three employees, including Mayor Robert Eastern III, tested positive. That outbreak has since grown to 12 confirmed cases. The city recommended that anyone that was in the municipal building within the last week get tested.
Per state guidance, individuals who test positive for COVID-19 or who show any signs or symptoms should stay home, and families and staff should also report possible cases to the school where the individual attends or works to initiate contact tracing.
The districts’ plans closely echo the ISBE guidelines: “Individuals who did not have close contact with the person who is sick can return to work immediately after disinfection,” the state guidance reads.
Will schools be held liable for infections?
Districts that don’t live up to public health guidelines and don’t make a attempt to protect their communities could be held liable in the courts by community members who are ill affected, Gov. JB Pritzker said in a press conference Wednesday.
No local districts have shared plans that indicate they plan to ignore the guidance.
Brain Braun, an attorney from Champaign who specializes in education law, said districts who were cavalier about following the guidance were “inching toward wanton and willful misconduct.”
“No one wants a COVID-positive student at school to infect other students,” he said. “But what no one who doesn’t have boots on the ground in education seems to understand is that determining who’s COVID-positive requires some ability to discern a positive student from a negative student, at the point of which the child first enters the supervision of school officials.”
State Senator Paul Schimpf (R-Waterloo) has urged Pritzker to issue an executive order to protect school districts from liability lawsuits.
Districts are supposed to test or have students self-certify they don’t have any symptoms before entering the building, per state guidance. Braun said self-certification would likely be the norm, because districts don’t want contend with either the healthcare privacy implications of testing students in front of each other, or the responsibility of reporting to the health department.
Committing to digital learning or in-person attendance
Families who are not comfortable sending their students to school are also given the option to commit to remote learning through the district for the entire first semester in some districts, including Belleville 201, Edwardsville 7 and O’Fallon 203.
All three districts are asking families to register for remote learning before the start of the school year, but it’s unclear in some districts if families will be able to switch to remote learning partway through the semester if the family changes its mind about in-person learning.
Edwardsville’s guidance explicitly says that no, families interested in remote learning needed to have registered by Friday.
“Some parents have expressed concerns that they might want to move their child from in-person to remote learning based on positive COVID cases popping up within our school or the area in general,” the district says in its guidance. “Please understand that if this occurs, it is extremely likely that the entire district will move into a remote learning environment.”
Edwardsville 7 did not respond Monday to requests for the number of students who registered.
Dosier said Friday that Belleville 201 Superintendent Brian Mentzer would have to answer the question, and he was out of the office.
“At this time, districts are trying to understand what family preferences are today, knowing what is currently known, so districts can plan staffing needs and social distancing strategies,” Benway said in an email, in response to the question. “I anticipate much will change between now and the start of school.”
“There are a lot of unknowns at this early stage. I know it doesn’t seem early for parents,” Braun said. “The ground is shifting on us for those of us who have to make decisions. The ground is shifting almost daily.”
This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
