Published: 12/1/2020 10:12:11 PM
Modified: 12/1/2020 10:12:04 PM
Worried that Thanksgiving get-togethers could spur new COVID-19 cases in schools, state officials last week announced that districts should temporarily exclude students from in-person learning if their families attended multi-household events over the break.
But schools were given discretion about how to enforce the guidance. Some are asking families point-blank if they attended holiday events and enforcing quarantine requirements accordingly.
Others are not.
However schools opt to deal with the post-Thanksgiving question, local officials are hearing an earful from angry parents and terrified teachers.
“I had one colleague relate it to a snow day: ‘You know, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t,’ ” said Jeanné Collins, superintendent of the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union.
In Rutland Northeast, Collins said she decided to survey parents or guardians directly about whether they gathered with multiple households over the holiday.
State officials had suggested that schools should ask families about multi-household gatherings as part of their daily health checks, which include a list of questions about whether students are exhibiting symptoms or have traveled out of state.
Collins decided to go a slightly different route, since the daily health checks are answered by students if parents have forgotten to fill it out that day. The superintendent didn’t believe she should ask students to answer the question if their parents hadn’t.
That’s partly because Collins says state guidelines are unclear about what to do about split or blended families. If parents had a Thanksgiving dinner with their children’s grandparents, but they also regularly rely on them for child care, did they technically break the governor’s order prohibiting multi-household gathering?
Ultimately, Collins said it was up to parents to use their best judgment.
“It really is not incumbent upon a superintendent to make Solomon-like decisions for families,” Collins said.
Adding to the confusion and anxiety was the manner in which the policy was announced, just two days before Thanksgiving. At a press conference last week, Gov. Phil Scott said the Agency of Education would be “directing schools” to ask students or parents about multi-household gatherings, and many, including listeners at home and the media, understood that to mean the state would mandate districts to do this.
“If the answer is yes, they’ll need to transition to remote learning for 14 days or seven days and a test,” the governor said at the time.
But the actual written guidance that had been issued to schools the night prior contradicted this, and gave local officials wide latitude about whether to ask the question at all, and whether to send kids home if they answered in the affirmative.
“People said, ‘Listen, I heard the governor say that you need to do this, so you need to do this.’ And then the schools said, ‘Well, here’s the written guidance that we were given,’ ” said Jay Nichols, executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association. (In a later news conference, Scott clarified that schools did have this discretion.)
The suggestion that schools would ask students about private family gatherings triggered a backlash and reverberated in the national right-wing mediasphere. Many principals opted not to inquire about Thanksgiving plans with students or families, Nichols said, because they felt their staff should not have to “police what really ought to be a parental responsibility.”
But the decision not to ask the question also got districts into plenty of hot water. Many teachers and staff complained that the school should do more to protect them, and even some parents decided to keep their kids at home because they worried their school was being too lax.
“Some kids are not going to school on the opposite end, where their parents have said, ‘You know, you guys aren’t really following the governor’s order,’ ” Nichols said.
Nichols also said many parents assumed that if their children quarantined, they could simply opt into remote learning. But that’s not necessarily as readily available as many think it is.
“Some school systems don’t have any remote options at all, because all of their kids are allowed to come back in person. Others have contracts with (the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative) that are already full. So there’s no room to add any students,” he said.
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