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A Massachusetts high school student went to in-person classes on the first day of school despite having tested positive for coronavirus days earlier, officials said.
Now, about 30 people who came in contact with the student at Attleboro High School are under a two-week quarantine.
The mayor of Attleboro, a city about 39 miles southwest of Boston, said the student was tested Sept. 9 and that the positive result came in Sept. 11. The student then went to school for the first day of classes on Sept. 14.
Mayor Paul Heroux said a public health nurse for the city spoke to the family on Tuesday and confirmed that the parents had known for days that their child had the virus before sending him to school.
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"There's no question about whether or not the parent knew," Heroux said.
The high school's principal, Bill Runey, said administrators learned of the student's positive test result Tuesday.
“I knew that we were going to end up having some cases, but I didn’t expect they would be on the first day,” he said.
The high school is following a hybrid learning model under which one group of students attend in-person classes on Monday and Thursday and another group on Tuesday and Friday, Runey said.
“Long story short, rumors started circulating around town, so someone contacted the bureau of health here in Attleboro and did some checking and found out that it was true, that he had tested positive,” Runey said Thursday.
About 30 students are now under a two-week quarantine to monitor for potential symptoms of Covid-19, he said.
The principal added that contact tracing helped the school identify who might be at risk.
"I was pleased that our contact-tracing protocols we put in place helped us pretty quickly ID and narrow down close contacts," Runey said, "Thirty is still a lot, but if we didn't have greater degree of certainty with seating charts and things like that, we would have had to err on the side of caution for a lot more kids."
SassyGumsquatch on September 17th, 2020 at 19:29 UTC »
My hometown's principal sent her daughter into school on the first day knowing she had covid. I am calling for her removal for endangering students but I doubt it will get anywhere cause nobody seems to care.
EDIT: In case you want more context my hometown has a pretty small high school and its principal sent her daughter to school on the first day despite her daughter having covid. They took her temperature at the door and she had to go home immediately. It is not officially known whether she knew she had covid, but she clearly was running a fever and had other covid symptoms so either my principal is even more of a moron than I already thought she was or she was being openly harmful. This isn't enough to actually get her into trouble and most of the population in my hometown seem to believe that covid is not something to be terribly concerned about.
I and a couple other concerned citizens are writing letters to people like the superintendent and will be speaking at the next school board meeting about all of the concerning things we have heard about the covid response. My hometown is the hotspot for the entire county now and I guarantee it is because of the school.
Voidstarblade on September 17th, 2020 at 18:50 UTC »
turns out teaching workers to go in sick for their entire lives by penalizing them for using sick leave or just not giving them any backfires in pandemics! after all, if they (the parents) have to go to work sick, so do their kids! school is work for kids!
crematoryfire on September 17th, 2020 at 18:25 UTC »
As the spouse of a public school teacher, this enrages me beyond words.