When Covid-19 cases cropped up in her schools last year, Montpelier-Roxbury Superintendent Libby Bonesteel said she had cellphone numbers for multiple people she could call at the Department of Health.
“Like clockwork,” she said, a conference call would be scheduled within the hour — or by 8 a.m. the next morning if test results arrived late at night — to discuss the situation and determine a path forward.
But this year, when five cases popped up in her schools the first week of class, Bonesteel called into an automated phone line. And then she waited. For days.
Districts have handled the heavy lifting on contact tracing since late last fall when the state announced amid a Covid-19 surge that educators would be tasked with calling close contacts when infected individuals appeared in schools.
Still, administrators and nurses say, schools could rely then on a near-immediate consultation with health department employees to make crucial decisions about who should quarantine and whether classrooms — or entire schools — should switch to remote learning.
Now, many say it’s often days before they can get someone on the phone. That means administrators — or, if the district is lucky enough to find one, school nurses — are left to themselves to interpret scant written guidance from the state in variable and fast-moving situations.
“The immediacy is essential,” said Kelly Landwehr, the president-elect of the Vermont State School Nurses Association and a school nurse at Middlebury Union High School.
Landwehr, who also serves as her district’s Covid-19 coordinator, said on Wednesday that she had run into this problem the day before. An entire classroom had just returned from quarantining when the district learned of another positive case affecting the class.
“I needed some guidance as to what to do. And getting that immediate response from the [health department] is just not something I’ve been successful with,” she said.
The state’s contact tracing workforce for all of 2020 was largely raised from within the Department of Health’s own ranks, with those staffers setting aside regular duties to marshall a response to the pandemic. But with cases falling, the state in May turned over the bulk of its contact tracing work to AM Trace, a private Virginia-based company.
In an email, health department spokesperson Ben Truman acknowledged that the department has been strained by the sudden and stubborn rise in cases.
“With the surge has come pressures ranging from staffing to technological, and it would be naive to ignore the very real frustrations that our schools and administrators are feeling as they manage the impact on their ability to keep schools running smoothly,” he wrote.
The department has begun re-deploying some staff members to assist with contact tracing, Truman said. He added that it is also working to address issues with its phone system.
“After an initial fix, we found more technical work was needed, and that has been or shortly will be resolved,” he said Wednesday.
School nurses and superintendents repeatedly expressed sympathy for health department employees, who they lauded for exemplary work last school year.
But educators say they, too, are burned out. And they find themselves with substantially less backup from the state than they did when overall health conditions were markedly better. Within the first month of instruction last year, the state had recorded just five cases of the virus within the state’s schools. In the first two weeks of school this year, the state has already reported 81.
One school nurse, Sophia Hall, who serves as the Covid-19 coordinator in the Kingdom East School District, said she has been contact-tracing daily since Aug. 21 — a full week before a single child entered her district’s buildings. (Staff were present for in-service and planning.)
“We have no home life. We’re here 12 to 14 hours a day,” said Clayton Wetzel, the Vermont director of the National Association of School Nurses.
There’s plenty of federal cash available to hire more people, he said, but schools are struggling to hire across the board — and nurses, who can command much higher wages in health care settings, are even tougher to recruit.
“I think the whole educational hierarchy is really being kind of exhausted overall,” he said.
And since the state has outsourced its contact tracing work, complaints have piled up about response times — both in and outside of school. For most of August, contact tracers called only 37% of Covid-19-positive individuals within 24 hours of their diagnosis, Seven Days reported this week. In earlier phases of the pandemic, Vermont’s contact tracers were reaching infected people within 24 hours of their test results more than 90% of the time.
Wider delays in contact tracing impact schools, too, Landwehr said, because outbreaks that start outside of school are less likely to be caught before spilling over into schools. And even if they don’t, parents will often call the school for information if the health department isn’t calling them back.
“It adds a lot of anxiety to families, again, especially in the smaller communities where you might have a school of 70 kids, and chances are a lot of them are playing together throughout the week or outside of school,” she said.
In a written statement, Steven Crim, AM Trace’s Chief Government Affairs Officer, said the company’s teams “in close coordination and collaboration with the state, work seven days a week to reach as many individuals and their close contacts as soon as possible.”
