State officials have said, over and over again, that when the Health Department calls, Vermonters need to pick up the phone. And from here on out, they had better not ignore calls from their local school, either.
Amid a surge in Covid-19 cases, schools are being deputized to take on part of the contact-tracing effort.
Health Department-trained investigators will still be responsible for interviewing anyone who tests positive for the virus, according to state guidance released Friday about the change and will decide who is deemed a close contact. But it will now be the school’s responsibility to call individual staff members and student families to tell them they need to quarantine and for how long.
In the Harwood Union school district, superintendent Brigid Nease said one positive case this week meant her staff had to call nearly 40 people to give them the bad news.
“This is generating great stress out in school communities, because, one, we’re not medically trained, and two, we do not have the staff and the capacity to do all of this calling when there is a case,” she said.
State officials say the change was made in part because districts have systems for communicating with families and because schools have in many instances wanted to be the first contact anyway.
And families, the state says, are also more likely to respond to a call from their school, rather than an unknown number belonging to a contact-tracer. A similar system is already in place at health care facilities, they say.
But the chief reason for the change, according to an Agency of Education memo announcing the change in policy, is to free up capacity at the Health Department.
The state’s regular contact-tracing workforce was set up to handle up to about 90 new cases a day, Health Commissioner Mark Levine said Friday, during the governor’s twice-weekly press conference. Last week the state began to see higher case numbers: 72 on Wednesday, 109 on Thursday, and 84 Friday.
“We’ve activated sort of our reserve contact workforce at the health department, and have additional resources coming in from around the state,” Levine said.
But while the Department of Health may be swamped, Nease says schools are, too. A critical shortage of staff and substitutes has hampered efforts to increase in-person instruction and left school leaders warning the public they are perennially on the brink of closure.
And a massive new surveillance testing program in the state’s K-12 schools, which is set to begin next week, will also take up significant administrative capacity for districts. About 25% of school teachers and staff will be tested for Covid each week. Officials anticipate testing all school personnel, or about 25,000 people, over the course of a month. The surveillance testing program is voluntary.
“Frankly, we’re hanging by a thread. We don’t have any more bandwidth,” Nease said.
