As COVID cases spike in Beaufort County SC, students return to school full time
On the first day of school after the holiday break — and the first day students have returned to the classroom full time since March — Superintendent Frank Rodriguez went back to the classroom, too. He stepped into his former job as history teacher, spending Monday co-teaching classes at Battery Creek High School.
Fourteen students sat in Rodriguez’s first period class, which covered the beginning of World War II. Students wore masks, though some had slipped under their noses, and took notes on Germany’s early invasion of Poland and the U.S.’s neutral stance.
Their desks sat about two feet apart, and the plastic barriers the district had touted as a way to maintain distance under DHEC and CDC guidelines were stacked unused on top of a filing cabinet.
“The kids don’t like the barriers,” principal Chad Cox said.
But they will go up in crowded classrooms once teachers and students adjust to the new normal for their schools, he said. Students will have the option to use them — or not — in less-crowded classrooms with low enrollment or mostly virtual students.
School resumed Monday as record numbers of Beaufort County residents have tested positive for COVID-19, with 167 students and staff quarantining over the break. That made some teachers nervous. The district has seen much slower disease spread than the county at large, but still recorded dozens of new COVID cases over winter break.
Col. Ricardo Player of the U.S. Marine Corps wrote to school board members Friday “on behalf of concerned Parris Island parents” asking them to stick to the previous hybrid model until the potential for post-holiday COVID spikes had cleared.
Since October, students have had the option to stay completely online or attend “hybrid” classes with two in-person school days and three virtual school days. Separating students into “A” and “B” day groups helped schools keep classroom sizes small, which allowed for social distancing.
But now, with the two groups combined, “the distancing is not as great as it was,” said Kathleen Corley, principal of Red Cedar Elementary school in Bluffton.
Red Cedar currently has 79.5% of students in face-to-face instruction. When the spring semester begins in February, that percentage will jump to 85.8%.
“We try to maintain six feet, but it’s hard with 18 or so students in a 900-square-foot classroom,” Corley said. “Plexiglass is our friend, and so is reminding kids to be serene,” to refrain from interacting with each other around the barriers.
At noon, students across Red Cedar were eating lunch in their classrooms, which is one of the only opportunities students have to remove their masks inside. In Dee Kubic’s third grade classroom, 11 students watched short science videos and ate, two at a table, separated by thin, flat plexiglass barriers.
“I don’t think safe is the right word,” Kubic said of the school’s precautionary measures. “I feel as comfortable as anyone can be in the situation.”
Kubic said she wants her students “to feel like I have it under control” when she asks them to stay apart from one another or fix their masks so there’s no “fear factor.”
“But when a kid gets sick or is a close contact ... I take it very personally,” she said.
Beaufort County passed 10,000 confirmed and probable cases of the virus Sunday, and has broken the single-day record for new cases twice in the last week.
As of Dec. 30 the school district has confirmed 278 COVID-19 cases among students and staff since Sept. 28, with 38 new cases reported in the first eight days of winter break.
Across six schools, 167 student-athletes and staff had to quarantine over winter break due to COVID-19 exposures.
Rodriguez has maintained that the school district’s spread of COVID-19 has remained low compared to the community’s spread, and that’s true — between 1% and 2% of the district’s total student and staff population have contracted the virus, compared to 5.2% of the county’s total population.
Rodriguez cited that low spread rate, along with the challenges of hybrid and virtual education, as a reason the district is returning to face-to-face instruction.
“In schools we have not been seeing the spread,” he said Monday. “As long as it remains low within our schools, we want to provide as much face-to-face instruction as we can, because we know that’s what’s best for our students.”
Students at Battery Creek on Monday agreed with Rodriguez. Each had their own reasons to go to the school building.
Junior Jacove Anderson and freshman Julianna Larche saw their grades drop during virtual learning; junior Alex Barradas Perez found asking questions on Zoom frustrating. Junior Destiny Barker had lost internet connection multiple times and couldn’t complete online work.
Seniors Aiden Ferguson and Matthew Selby hadn’t struggled with online learning, but had to come back on campus for JROTC activities and figured they could take classes there, too.
“I work with people that have had COVID,” Barradas Perez said. “From what I’ve seen, it’s nothing to be too afraid of. ... Right now I’m just trying to focus on my studies.”
But several staff and community members have asked why it was necessary to make the shift to full-time instruction right after the holidays.
One district elementary teacher said her school was thrown into “constant chaos and unnecessary exposure” in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks. She said several teachers had been tapped to fill in for quarantining teachers, and that it was impossible to provide a solid education as a rotating cast of staff watched over students who weren’t theirs.
The district’s substitute teacher pool has shrunk dramatically during the pandemic, making it difficult for schools to hire substitutes for absences both quarantine- and non quarantine-related. Rodriguez said the solution is asking school and district staff to cover these classrooms.
Some teachers are still providing instruction remotely during quarantine, which means schools just have to find “a body in the room to mind students,” Red Cedar’s Corley said. If the teacher is unable to teach, then a certified professional has to take over the class.
Red Cedar has recorded 11 COVID cases between Sept. 28 and Dec. 30.
Corley said Monday that she’s had only one quarantine that involved both adults and students, around Halloween. She’s had others that are smaller, but none has involved people infecting each other at school.
Despite that, she currently has four staff members working positions they normally wouldn’t to cover staff absences.
If the situation worsens, she could have to draw substitutes from her teaching assistants and bilingual liaisons — that would prevent classes from having to consolidate and disrupt the smaller “bubbles” they’ve been in, but it would also rob other classes of much-needed support.
To help teachers handle the stress they’re under, Red Cedar counselor Rebecca Hannahs said she’s turned her office into a “self-care cafe.” They can come into her office whenever they want, and “just sit here and not say anything.”
“Sometimes the anxiety can overwhelm people, and they shut down,” Hannahs said. “This room becomes like a sensory deprivation tank to them. I try to bring that self-care aspect to the staff, too.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 4:55 AM.