In the end, only one of the three students tested positive, but after that scare, Milisauskas added another layer of security checks. Previously, the school measured temperatures and bus drivers asked students questions about their health before boarding; now Milisauskas also made the students come to the cafeteria on arrival, where the school nurse and some of the more cautious teachers, who knew the students well, also analyzed these issues more fully, while evaluating the students in looking for signs of illness. Of the few teachers who tested positive at the school since September, none have been screened until transmission at the school. And less than five quarantined students tested positive, Milisauskas says – although even those students also had other close contacts who tested positive at the time, making it more likely that they contracted the virus outside of school.
As the school year progressed, experiences that required problem solving on the spot became increasingly common, as teachers and administrators were forced to struggle to adjust to increasingly positive cases that required quarantine of students. teachers. The state Department of Health was so late in tracking contacts that it recruited school nurses to help with the job, many of them calling late into the night. Rather than waiting for contact trackers or overworked nurses to help determine who would stay at home or not, schools solved the problem by switching classrooms to remote learning on some occasions when someone in the class was known to be positive; depending on how many students needed quarantine, the class would either resume in person or be remote.
Many days in many schools have passed with little interruption; but sometimes, in schools with extensive quarantine, what students experienced did not exactly fit anyone’s idea of what personal learning should be; what they were being offered would best be described as “learning outside the home”. At Nathanael Greene Middle School, also in Providence, when there were not enough teachers, the principal, Roy Sermons, sometimes moved two pods whose teachers were outside a large gym so that a third teacher, sometimes one who was entirely part of the district virtual program, could be called to supervise all students. In a single space, 30 children would be zooming with one teacher, 30 with another, while the local teacher tried to keep an eye on 60 restless high school students, as she was also teaching classes via Zoom with her own students elsewhere. The union filed a lawsuit requesting the school to close for security reasons. The judge rejected the action.
In December, an executive order from the governor allowed retired educators to take the place of substitutes for more than 90 days without losing retirement benefits. Even beyond the staff issue, the erratic nature of entering and leaving remote learning was, in many classrooms, affecting any appearance of routine. Caroline LeStrange, a teacher at Alan Shawn Feinstein Primary School on Broad Street, tested positive for Covid on December 2, meaning that all of her students were out of school for two weeks. A gym teacher at the school who alternated in five different classrooms was a close contact with someone who tested positive, and the school quarantined all five classrooms while waiting for the results of a Covid test, including LeStrange’s. , adding several more days to the number of classes his first grade students missed. Several children in her class had siblings who were exposed to other students or teachers with a positive test, which meant that these children lost even more days at school. The students – many of them children of immigrants, many of them qualified for free lunch – struggled with the rapid changes in schedules when they emerged. She could access her students’ computers, watching parents try and fail to connect their students to the required application, eventually getting tired of LeStrange’s repeated efforts to train them during the process in a language they did not understand. In a few days, when she tried to teach a Zoom class, only three students showed up. Those students who managed to connect, with the help of the nursery they attended, made their notes: “I miss you! I love you!”
Superintendents and their teams were trying to reconcile, for teachers and administrators, competing patterns of facts that were emerging. On the one hand, cases across the state were starting to rise and should only get worse after Thanksgiving; administrators were exhausted by the stress of fighting for coverage and making quick decisions about whether or not to change a classroom to a remote one, sometimes the night before families expected to send their students to school. On the other hand, with each passing week, the district saw more reassuring evidence that student and teacher transmission was low – and that, although teachers were stressed, they were showing up and managing to keep the doors open.
On November 18, with statewide positive test rates of around 6 percent, Raimondo announced that for a finite period – she expected no more than two weeks – high schools could drop to 25 percent a year. from 30 November. A few weeks later, Olayinka Alege, an administrator who oversees Providence elementary and high schools, received a text from an anxious school principal with about 1,000 students. “Almost 50 cases, now in the janitorial team,” he said; the number referred to the total number of students and employees who had tested positive since the beginning of classes. When the two men spoke, the principal explained how heavy the burden of keeping the school open weighed on him, how responsible he felt: Was having the students keep coming was the right thing to do? They talked briefly, but even so, the principal asked Alege to call later that night, just so they could go over the facts again: the school was safer than ever, now that it had dropped to 25% of capacity ; they knew that the cases traced back to schools were low; they knew that schools provided a structure that protected children from taking health risks. Alege says he understood that the teacher, like others, occasionally needed this guarantee so that he could “lay his head on the pillow at night, knowing he was doing the right thing for the children”. The principal’s school, like all others in Providence, remained open until December 20, when the district temporarily switched to remote education just days before the winter break began.
At the end of the first semester, the results for Providence students who attended school in person were far from ideal: 22% of all classroom students had at least one incomplete student in a class. But the number was even worse for virtual students, 37 percent of whom had at least one incomplete. School openings have also proved important for public health across the state: regular immunization rates plunged last spring, but largely recovered in October, a function, most likely, of the requirement that students be vaccinated before returning to classes. The same was true of lead exhibitions, which are required for kindergarten attendance.