Local school systems are forcing students back despite terrible safety protocols and a refusal to take covid seriously. As covid cases among children skyrocket, it is a catastrophe that’s only going to get worse
Above: Asheville City Schools list of covid protocols, from an Aug. 19 school board presentation. Over half the items are just safety practices the school system decided to abandon
Blade writer Matilda Bliss contributed to this article
School is back in Asheville and Buncombe County, and there’s already been at least one covid outbreak. By the time this publishes there will no doubt be many more.
Unlike last year, neither administration offered an accessible virtual option. Asheville City Schools chose this summer not to offer it at all. Buncombe offered a virtual academy but only with limited spots that filled within a few days of opening.
Since attending school is not optional parents were left with a stark choice. They could send their child back into a dangerous situation where they would risk illness or even death or they could file to homeschool or get a “homebound” exemption that requires medical paperwork. For many working class parents, the latter are not an option.
They have good reason to not want to send their kids back. The delta variant is ravaging the area, with some of the worst covid case numbers since the winter surge. Delta is highly contagious and children are far more vulnerable to it than previous strains. Parents know this. Indeed, a recent CDC-funded study found that an overall majority of parents — especially Black and Latinx parents — do not want to send their children back to full-time in-person schooling.
Even with the strictest precautions this would be an almost impossible challenge. The two local public school systems do not have that or anything close.
Buncombe just made headlines in the Asheville Citizen-Times for refusing to disclose covid outbreaks. Their administration is also refusing to allow staff even the option of isolating when exposed. The Blade has confirmed that in at least one case a school worker with a severe covid case in their household was pushed to continue to work. Around students. It’s doubtful that just happened once. This presents an extreme danger and goes against all available science that shows that the delta variant is many times more infectious than previous strains.
Asheville City Schools only requires three feet of distancing, laughable considering how contagious delta is. When a student has been exposed to covid or appears ill, staff are prohibited from informing other students or families until the case has been confirmed positive, which is more than enough time for the virus to spread to those around them.
Administrators are also prioritizing “seat time” in classrooms over student safety, as revealed by Blade reporter Veronica Coit earlier today. Multiple parents report that despite early reassurances they’d be lenient on attendance, many administrators are now refusing to consider it a valid excuse when a student stays home while awaiting test results due to exposure to the virus. According to the same protocols, furthermore, testing only begins when a student has started to show symptoms or has been in close contact with someone else who tested positive.
The ACS protocols list multiple basic safety practices that administrators just decided to outright abandon, from virtual learning to symptom checks. Indeed, students exposed to covid are not even required to quarantine or test “if they consistently and correctly wore masks when exposed to COVID-19.”
This is, bluntly, not how covid works.
Indeed, Asheville City Schools admitted they had at least 22 cases of covid in the first week back.
This was predictable. Local covid cases among school age children who are too young to be vaccinated are exploding. The current wave is even worse than the December-January outbreak, especially among elementary and middle school-aged children, who are seeing the worst case numbers of the pandemic; more than 50 percent higher than anything recorded over winter. Those between ages five and nine are most vulnerable, with cases more than doubling previous records. Cases among infants, toddlers and preteens alike are reaching new heights barely a week into schooling.
In the month and a half before schools re-opened, covid cases among children — especially those too young to be vaccinated — skyrocketed. Administrators insisted on re-opening anyway. Graphic by Matilda Bliss
Indeed, nationally and regionally many school systems have no sooner opened than they’ve had to shut back down for varying time periods due to massive outbreaks.
The schools should never have re-opened in the first place until every teacher, staffer and student was fully vaccinated. People, including children, are going to get sick because of this. Some may face lifelong conditions due to it. Tragically, some may even die.
The fact that families were forced back without a virtual learning option available for everyone who needed it (which the school systems managed to offer last year) is an atrocity.
It’s also not an accident.
Last year, after all, the Asheville City School board insisted on holding an in-person meeting despite a major covid outbreak (nearly every government body had switched to virtual meetings) just as it was getting criticism for a lack of transparency.
There’s no secret plot to spread covid. But there are some really evil things going on in what’s being prioritized and who is considered expendable.
The first is a catastrophic insistence on getting “back to normal” regardless of the circumstances. In May and June, when case numbers had tumbled to their lowest rates since the start of the pandemic, there might have been some sense at planning to resume in-person schooling (though it would take far stricter protocols and a robust virtual option). But by early July it was clear that delta was highly contagious and spreading rapidly in ways that rendered previous plans nigh-useless.
No matter. School administrators, a notoriously clueless lot even in non-pandemic times, insisted on steamrolling ahead with their plans anyway. Not based around what would stop covid — because the obvious answer is “stopping in-person schooling and paying people to stay home until everyone above 5 is vaccinated — but around what would “get things back to normal.”
The defense of this approach, such as it is, is that students’ learning suffers from being out of the classroom. This is a bit like observing that one should stay in a burning building because it’s chilly outside. Learning, and life, suffers from illness, from family and loved ones suddenly getting sick or dying. On top of that, forcing people to send their kids back to school by gutting virtual options is imposing a wrenching burden upon already strained parents.
Then there’s greed. Since Buncombe’s first major wave last summer, those with more money — liberal and conservative alike — have relentlessly pushed forcing people back to work. Buncombe commissioners offered a sterling example, when they blatantly let the hotel industry dictate when they re-opened, while county staff kept working remotely from home.
Not shockingly cases started skyrocketing after that.
Nationally and locally, part of the drive towards re-opening schools at all cost is the same kind of move, forcing people back to work. This isn’t speculation, the head of Biden’s economic council outright said that schools should re-open to help end the “labor shortage.” That exploitation is, after all, “normal” too.
So children are forced back into the classroom, with administrations apparently figuring that if they just don’t talk about it, no one will notice and everything will be back to normal, no matter how many people it kills.
—
Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.
The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by our readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.