‘A tremendous family man’: Bluffton Middle School teacher dies of COVID complications
This story will be updated.
Terry Wisdom, a teacher at Bluffton Middle School, died Wednesday from COVID-19 complications.
Wisdom was a Gateway to Technology teacher whose classes included design and modeling, medical detectives and automation and robotics.
“Mr. Wisdom’s students and colleagues will remember him as the witty colleague, a tremendous family man, and lover of all things Oklahoma,” principal Matt Hall wrote in a Wednesday email to parents.
“He was supportive, dependable, always willing to give of himself to others, and an enormous advocate for his Project Lead the Way content, his Robotics team, and the football and track programs.”
Hall said in the email that students will be informed of Wisdom’s death Thursday, and that additional counselors will be on hand at the school.
The school will give parents details about funeral arrangements and ways to support Wisdom’s family “as soon as they are available,” Hall wrote.
Beaufort County School District has not made numbers available for COVID-19 infections and quarantines by school.
However, district spokesperson Candace Bruder said Tuesday that Bluffton Middle had one of the highest rates of infection among the district’s 31 schools last week, along with Bluffton High School, Hilton Head Island High School and Hilton Head Island Middle School.
On Aug. 30, Hall told parents in an email that the school “has had to begin quarantining entire classrooms.”
“If we continue to see a rise in Covid cases in our school, we will need to quarantine our ENTIRE school for at least two weeks and move to 100% online learning,” Hall wrote, adding that he was “highly encouraging masks in our school building.”
Between Aug. 30 and Sunday, the Beaufort County School District logged 236 new COVID-19 cases, with 220 of those infections among students and 16 among staff.
During the same time period, 2,839 students and 49 staff were in quarantine, which is a new record for the district. About one in every eight BCSD students was quarantined last week.
Since school began on Aug. 16, the district has recorded 670 COVID-19 cases. About 2.7% of BCSD’s combined student and staff population of 24,400 has tested positive for COVID-19 in the past three weeks.
This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 4:40 PM.