More than 5,000 Fort Worth students and teachers in quarantine for COVID-19 exposure
More than 5,000 students and teachers in the Fort Worth school district are in quarantine after being exposed to COVID-19, district officials said.
On Friday, 5,484 students and 410 teachers were in quarantine, district spokeswoman Barbara Griffith said. Over the past week, 72 district staff and 465 students tested positive for the virus, Griffith said.
Fort Worth students returned to school Aug. 16. Under the district’s COVID-19 protocols, anyone with a symptomatic case of COVID-19 must quarantine until their symptoms improve and 10 days have passed since they began having symptoms. Anyone with an asymptomatic case must quarantine for 10 days after testing positive.
Anyone who isn’t vaccinated must quarantine for 10 days after coming in close contact with someone with COVID-19. The district defines “close contact” as being within six feet of someone infected with COVID-19 for 15 minutes or more, meaning entire classes wouldn’t necessarily need to quarantine in cases where students test positive for the virus.
Vaccinated people don’t need to quarantine after being exposed to the virus as long as they don’t develop symptoms.
Ernie Moran, a Spanish teacher at Western Hills High School, said on any given day, about two to four students in each of his classes are out either because they tested positive for COVID-19 or they’re quarantining after coming in contact with someone who had the disease. The number of positive cases at his school seems to be low, Moran said, but there’s a larger number of students who are in quarantine. He worries that students will continue to test positive, and their classmates will continue to have to quarantine, for the rest of the school year.
“It’s just going to be a cycle of different kids,” he said.
The district’s quarantine policy states that students who are required to quarantine are given excused absences. But students are still responsible for making up the work they missed while they were out. Unlike last year, the district isn’t offering a virtual option for students who are in quarantine this year. That means teachers need to come up with assignments that go over the material the class covered that day, but can be done remotely, Moran said.
In general, teachers can send those assignments to students online, and quarantined students can complete them at home and submit them online, Moran said. But at the beginning of the year, when the district hadn’t yet distributed devices to every student who needed one, that process was trickier, he said. In a few cases, Moran took assignments to students’ homes and stood outside their windows to teach short lessons.
In a Wednesday press conference, officials with Cook Children’s Health Care System said the hospital was quickly becoming overrun with a combination of sick children and staff who are exhausted or have fallen ill themselves. On Monday, 601 children showed up at the hospital, about twice as many as the daily seasonal average. Severe staffing shortage and a large influx of patients forced the network to close an urgent care clinic in Hurst and shorten hours elsewhere.
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 4:02 PM.
