This parent gives Boston schools an ‘F’ on Covid protocols

To the Editor:

The Boston Public Schools’ lackluster Covid-19 protocols are failing families and putting the greater community at risk. My children attend three different schools in Dorchester: a large BPS school, a charter, and a private early ed program. My BPS sixth grader informed me in passing that six children in her class were out after someone tested positive. She was not a close contact, and I was not informed by the school.

A few days later I was contacted by a parent who told me that her daughter, who attends the same school in a different class, had tested positive that morning. I then tested my daughter and isolated her. She was positive, but asymptomatic.

If this other parent had not alerted me, my daughter would have continued to expose the at-risk members of our household. I would have sent her to school on Monday. We would have exposed dozens of other households at my other children’s schools and burdened several working parents with 10-day quarantine and testing protocols at best, or infected other vulnerable people at worst.

My child’s BPS school opted to suspend pool testing for the Thanksgiving week. My daughter’s case, and any other cases, were not identified before the break. The decision defies logic.

It is as though they have lost track of what proactive testing and transparency is for. In a time when Covid cases across the Commonwealth are increasing at an alarming rate and hospital bed occupancy hovers at 90 percent, our mitigation efforts must be most vigilant, not suspended.

Cases at BPS schools have been steadily on the rise since the last week in October, when they more than tripled coming off the Halloween weekend. Even when you control for the outlier of the 42 cases at the Conley School in Jamaica Plain, which were reported the week of November 4-11, the case numbers that week are alarming. There have been 827 cases reported by BPS since the start of the school year, according to the dashboard posted on the BPS website. More than half have been recorded over the course of the last three weeks.

Pool testing should be opt-out, if not mandatory. Early identification and isolation are the best tools we have available to mitigate the spread of cases and maximize the amount of in-classroom instruction and socialization our children desperately need.

Participation in pool testing is extremely low. Only half of my six grader’s class is routinely tested, and my second grader’s charter school class participation is in single digits. Schools are under tremendous pressure to make up for learning loss caused by the pandemic, but this cannot be done at the expense of our most vulnerable. BPS needs to adopt a proactive early identification approach, and then take it seriously if we are to keep our communities safe and our children in school.

I am grateful for the positive outcome for our household. As far as I can tell, we did not spread it to anyone else. But this was in no way attributable to the public health system. Rather this is due only to the efforts of another proactive mother, to whom I am forever grateful. The system has failed us, and I fear we are in for a very dark winter if BPS does not change its ways.

Deirdre Habershaw
Ashmont/Adams

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