Paul Bass file photo
Sonia Clubb and Supt. Iline Tracey Sunday handing out test kits outside King/Robinson.
Iline Tracey handed out the first batch of Covid-19 rapid at-home tests to nervous teachers Sunday as the school system prepared to reopen Monday amid a surge of cases.
The schools plan to have masks on hand for all adult staffers Monday morning, along with test kits for families with children showing symptoms, Tracey said.
The distribution took place amid a greater anxiety among teachers not only in New Haven, but statewide: Now that society has reached a consensus that schools need to stay open in the pandemic, how can that be done safely during the peaks of surges like the current one driven by the Omicron variant? Omicron, while believed to be less lethal than previous variants, is far more contagious; the state has reported surpassing a 20 percent testing positivity rate.
“We’re going to make it strategic,” Tracey, who has dubbed herself the “Covid superintendent,” said in between handouts Sunday. The district will decide classroom by classroom, perhaps in some cases school by school, whether to send people home.
Tracey noted that she does not have the authority to switch to remote learning, as some parents have recommended. Only the legislature, or the governor by emergency order, can have remote learning count toward the 180-day minimum of annual required school days.
The state has altered its guidance, and left districts in some confusion. For instance, new guidance issued Friday by the state Department of Public Health suggests that schools abandon contact tracing.
“Because individual-level contact tracing is a tool that becomes less effective when community transmission levels are high, DPH recommends that schools begin to refocus the activities of health staff away from the investigation of relatively low risk in-school exposures and toward the identification, early isolation, and clinical management of students and staff with active symptoms that could be related to COVID-19,” the guidance states. “… [R]outine contact tracing of individual exposures that occur inside schools or during school-organized and supervised activities can be discontinued (subject to the conditions and provisions indicated below) without posing a significant increased risk of negative impact on in-school transmission of COVID-19 or access to in-person learning.”
The document includes the above chart with more detailed recommendations about how to address Covid-19 when school resumes Monday from Christmas break.
Tracey said Sunday she’s waiting on guidance from the city’s Health Department on the contact tracing question.
Newly elected teachers union President Leslie Blatteau blasted the DPH recommendation on contact tracing as “a real kick in the gut. It’s surreal. We need help at the state level. The opposite is happening.”
Blatteau said she and other teachers have two overriding concerns about Monday’s reopening:
• Access to tests: “It seems shortsighted. We’re going to send everybody back untested. Will we be in a worse place in a week or two?”
• Low staffing levels, which were already strained before Omicron exploded. “The stress is already so high,” she said.
Samantha Ginzberg picks up her Whirl-Pak Sunday.
“I’m glad we got the test kits. I’m nervous about tomorrow,” a Davis Academy for Arts And Design Innovation pre‑K teacher named Danielle said after leaving Sunday’s distribution at Newhallville’s King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School with her Whirl-Pak.
Anika Russell, a school social worker, said she came because her mother, who works at a homeless shelter tested positive, and now she herself feels congested.
Samantha Ginzberg, a Wilbur Cross English teacher, is awaiting results of a Covid test after learning she had been present with someone who tested positive over the holiday week. “I’m anxious,” she said.