What happened after 1 elementary discovered a positive coronavirus case
LAWRENCE (WISH) — You might not realize it, but there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes inside of a school after its administrators discover a positive coronavirus case.
One Marion County district gave News 8 an inside look at one school’s strategy to combat the virus.
A couple of weekends ago, a student teacher at Sunnyside Elementary in the Lawrence Township school district, tested positive for the coronavirus. Principal Tierney Anderson sprang into action.
“It’s very stressful. It really is because you want to do the right thing and you try to keep everybody safe,” Anderson said.
Anderson’s team let parents know via email that night. Anderson told News 8 she came in Sunday morning and got everything ready for that whole class to switch to online learning. Each affected family got a bilingual contact-tracing letter with instructions. All 17 students, plus the teacher, were to stay at home to quarantine.
The principal told News 8 on Monday that the student, the teacher and the other 17 students are healthy and back in class.
“A lot of work goes into positive cases. We go into actual classrooms. We contact-trace. That means we see who sits by that person, whether the teacher or the student for longer than 15 minutes. We literally go in there with yardsticks and see who is in that space, closer than 6 feet.”
On the school bus, students can only sit with people from their household. Students also have the same seating chart no matter what class they’re in. In the cafeteria, students sit in assigned seats; when they get to the tables they sit on little red stickers to make sure they are socially distanced.
“We sit them next to the same students all the time so we know exactly who sits next to who in the event of a positive case,” Anderson said.
Amanda Pardue, the school district’s nursing services coordinator, told News 8 the district started working on coronavirus plans in early summer, and it’s taking the pandemic very seriously. News 8 asked Pardue if the school district’s plan working?
“I think it’s definitely working. We have a quick response. We’re getting people who were close-contact home and quarantined and away from others pretty quickly so they’re not exposed to anyone else. They stay home 14 days from their last date of contact with a positive case,” Pardue said.