Only one of the three students eventually tested positive, but after that scare, Milisauskas added another layer of security checks. Schools used to take temperatures and bus drivers asked students questions about their health before boarding; now Milisauskas also had the students come to the cafeteria upon arrival, where the school nurse and some of Covid’s most careful teachers, who knew the students well, also reviewed those questions more thoroughly, while also assessing the students for signs of illness. Of the handful of teachers who tested positive at the school since September, none could be traced back to transmission at school. And fewer than five students in quarantine eventually tested positive, Milisauskas says – although even those students also had other close contacts that were positive at the time, making it just as likely they had contracted the virus outside of school.
As the school year progressed, experiences that needed to be resolved on the spot became more common as teachers and administrators were forced to adapt to increasingly positive cases where teachers had to be quarantined. The Department of Health was so far behind in tracking down contacts that it enlisted school nurses to help with that work, and many of them called late into the night. Rather than waiting for contact tracers or overworked nurses to help determine who would and would not stay at home, schools solved the problem by switching classrooms to distance learning on some occasions when someone in the class was positive; depending on how many students needed to be quarantined, the class would be resumed in person or kept at a distance.
In many schools, many days passed with few interruptions; but sometimes, in schools with extensive quarantine, what students experienced didn’t quite fit a person’s idea of what personal learning should be; what was offered to them could be better described as ‘non-home learning’. At Nathanael Greene Middle School, also in Providence, the principal, Roy Preken, sometimes moved two pods whose teachers were to a large gym, when there weren’t enough teachers, so that a third teacher, sometimes one that was entirely part of it. district. virtual program, could be enabled to supervise all students. In a single room, 30 children would zoom with one teacher, 30 with another, while the teacher on site tried to keep an eye on 60 restless high school students while also teaching through Zoom with her own students elsewhere. The union filed suit asking for the school to close for security reasons. The judge turned down the suit.
In December, an executive order from the governor allowed educators to fill in retirement more than 90 days without losing retirement benefits. Aside from the staff issue, the erratic nature of getting in and out of distance learning in many classrooms demanded every semblance of routine. Caroline LeStrange, a schoolteacher at Alan Shawn Feinstein Elementary School in Broad Street, tested positive for Covid on December 2, which meant that all of her students were out of school for two weeks. A PE teacher at the school who switched to five different classrooms was in close contact with someone who tested positive, and the school quarantined all five classrooms pending the results of a Covid test, including LeStrange’s, and added a number of days to the number of schools. her first graders missed. Several children in her class had siblings who were exposed to other students or teachers who tested positive, which meant those kids missed even more days at school. The students – many of them immigrant children, many of them eligible for a free lunch – struggled with the rapid schedule changes when they got up. She was able to access her students’ computers and watched parents try and fail their students to log into the required application, and eventually grew tired of LeStrange’s repeated attempts to guide them through the process in a language they did not understand. Some days when she tried to teach a Zoom class, only three students showed up. The students who were able to get online, using the daycare they attended, wrote her notes, “Missing you! I love you!”
Superintendents and their staff tried, for teachers and administrators, to reconcile competing fact patterns that surfaced. On the one hand, cases started to rise statewide and were expected to get worse only after Thanksgiving; administrators were exhausted by the stress of seeking cover and making quick decisions about whether or not to change from a classroom to a remote place, sometimes the night before families expected to send their students to school. On the other hand, with each week passing, the district saw more reassuring evidence that student and teacher handover was low – and that, although teachers were stressed, they took the opportunity and managed to keep the doors open.
On Nov. 18, with statewide positive test rates of about 6 percent, Raimondo announced that for a finite period – she hoped no more than two weeks – high schools could drop to 25 percent from Nov. 30. A few weeks later, Olayinka Alege, an administrator who oversees the secondary and high schools in Providence, received a text message from an anxious principal of a school of about 1,000 students. “Nearly 50 cases, now in the janitor,” it read; the number referred to the total of students and staff who had tested positive since the start of the school. When the two men spoke, the principal explained how heavy the burden of keeping the school open was on him, how responsible he felt: was it even the right choice to have the students come? They talked briefly, but even then the principal asked Alege to call back later that evening so they could discuss the facts again: High school was safer than ever, with capacity dropping to 25 percent; they knew that there were few cases that could be traced back to schools; they knew that schools provided a structure that protected children from taking health risks. Alege says he understood that the teacher, like others, needed that reassurance from time to time so that he could lay his head on the pillow at night, knowing that he is doing the right thing for children. The principal’s school, like every other in Providence, remained open until December 20, when the district temporarily switched to distance learning a few days before the winter break started.
At the end of the first semester, the results for Providence students attending school in person were far from ideal: 22 percent of all in-person students had at least one incomplete in a class. But the number was even worse for virtual learners, 37 percent of whom had at least one incomplete. School openings also proved important to public health, statewide: Regular vaccination rates fell sharply last spring, but largely recovered by October, a feature very likely of the requirement for students to be vaccinated before returning to class. The same was true for lead screenings, which are required to attend kindergarten.