Pasco schools to stay open despite teacher fears over COVID rates and staffing shortages

Pasco’s school board refused to pull elementary students from in-person classes despite COVID-19 safety concerns from hundreds of teachers.

Instead this week, school administrators promised to hire a consultant to review how well the district is keeping students and staff safe, and address the lack of substitute teachers.

They stopped short of making any changes to the current schedule that brings K-5 students into classrooms for half a day, twice a week. Middle and high schools have not attended in-person this school year.

“When I hear people talk about being uncomfortable, or not feeling safe that pains me to hear that as a superintendent who take very seriously my responsibility to keep kids and staff safe,” Superintendent Michelle Whitney told the school board Tuesday night. “That discomfort of our staff is deeply important to us and something that we as a district staff are concerned about.”

Whitney said district’s goal is to let teachers and parents pick whether to be in the buildings or work online.

While the district had planned to expand the elementary day at the beginning of the semester, it’s unlikely to change before February. Each building is being affected differently, and administrators are turning to principals in the schools to help with making sense of it.

The Pasco Association of Educators called on the school district to return to distance learning amid concerns that parents weren’t cooperating with contact tracing, the growing number of teacher absences and rising COVID cases in staff and students.

Based on current rate of infection in Franklin County, more than 80% of the 787 teachers responding to the union’s survey said they didn’t feel it was safe to be teaching in person.

Several of those teachers along with concerned parents reached out to school leaders asking them to change their position on schools.

”We have high-risk teachers that should not be forced to take a pay cut or return and risk their health,” parent Rachel Alexander said. “Stop listening to parents protesting that they want their kids back in school. The majority of us do not want to return until after the new year.”

Jerrod Dailey, a Stevens Middle School teacher and military veteran explained he signed up to be in harms way when he joined in 2000, but now as a teacher he doesn’t believe it’s right to make people go into harm’s way to get an education.

“Who is going to accept responsibility when it finally does kill a kid or educator in our schools?” he asked.

Parents and students looking to go back to school also shared their frustrations.

One Ray Reynolds Middle School student said he is struggling with Zoom when the teacher calls on him to read in class.

“My son can’t take any more online school,” said a parent. “Our students are getting no guidance on scholarships. I have now had to personally withdraw my dyslexic son from his next two advanced math classes because he simply can’t understand in this format.”

Franklin County COVID rates

Franklin County reached 1,069 new cases per 100,000 people during the two-weeks ending on Dec. 1, according to the Benton Franklin Health District.

While state officials are considering raising the guidelines, the state Department of Health continues to recommend not returning to hybrid learning until the number of new cases has slipped to 75 new cases per 100,000 during a two-week period.

The state has pointed out that the figure is still a recommendation, and are leaving any decisions up to local health districts and school boards for when schools should open.

The health district’s Health Officer Amy Person continued to support Pasco’s limited in-person schedule for K-5 students.

While students and staff have contracted COVID-19, Person said the cases appear to be coming from outside of the school rather than being passed between students and teachers.

“We’re still not seeing transmission in places where protocols are followed,” Person said. “We have some gaps in knowing where all of the cases are occurring because not everyone will respond to our questions. ... We still don’t see increases in people who are getting infected because of being in school.”

Since September, the school district had 187 cases of COVID reported among staff and students. Of those, 89 have been reported since Nov. 23.

Board members said they understood the concerns, but felt the safety precautions in place are adequate to stop it from spreading inside schools.

Board President Amy Phillips said they take all of the concerns from both sides seriously.

“So when we are brought concerns we look into them very deeply, on both sides, because there are significant concerns about our children’s health, our teachers’ health, their social-emotional well being, out educational well-being all of these things, so it’s critical to us,” she said.

The Pasco district has about 19,000 students, making it the largest in the Tri-Cities.

Absent teachers

Pasco saw a smaller number of teachers and paraeducators call out sick in November 2020 compared to the same month last year, but a growing percentage of those absences resulted in not having a substitute to fill them.

Union leaders raised this concern in their letter to the school board, blaming quarantining for draining the substitute pool and creating a number of classrooms without teachers.

“Due to the inability to find coverage, we are now tapping into our secondary staff to support at the elementary level,” they wrote in the letter. “The burden being placed on Pasco School District staff is creating additional stress which may increase future health issues.”

Whitney said the stress on staff and concern for students’ education are real, especially when teachers are called to fill in for classes they aren’t familiar with.

To address it, the district has already added 30 new substitutes, and are bringing in a new group of student teachers who are being invited to apply as substitutes, said Sarah Thornton, the executive director of human resources and legal affairs.

Whitney and others in the central administration are stepping in to fill the empty spots in the schools, Thornton said.

“We’re going to continue to monitor this. We know that this is a really impactful issue for our buildings,” she said. “We have a number of principals who have subbed in classrooms basically every day since we brought students back.”

Increasing contact tracing

The number of cases where staff members have reported either having COVID-like symptoms or having close contact with the disease has increased by seven times between September and November.

These are generally triggered when staff members submit a daily form before heading to work.

The school district’s team of contact tracers investigated 363 cases in November, and is on track to beat that number by December, Thornton said. The people involved don’t necessarily have COVID, but they need to be tracked in case they do.

“It’s been challenging, to be very frank with you, to keep up over the last month with the number of reports that we’re getting on the screener that need follow up,” Thornton said.

School nurses across the district are responsible to handling the student cases. There were a total 501 investigations that happened during November.