Some parents in Neosho, Mo., on the western edge of the Ozarks, were all for Newton County’s ongoing “experiment” of letting kids who’d been exposed to COVID-19 go back to class and even play sports instead of quarantining.
“They have to have so many kids in school to keep them open,” and with hundreds out for 14 days at a time, in keeping with CDC guidelines, that was becoming an issue, said Cathy Dickens, a small business owner whose youngest child just graduated from high school.
The health risks involved just didn’t strike her as too dramatic: “It’s like the other things you spread. You socially distance and wear a mask, yet with a vaccine, we’ll actually inject the virus. It’s proven you’re going to spread it, so you might as well get it out there.”
That’s such a common feeling in this town of 12,000 that a mom who sees this nonchalance as “nuts” also said she’s afraid her business would fail if she let me use her name: “I’ve already had to unfollow everyone I’ve ever known on Facebook. More people than I ever would have believed think we’ll never hear about COVID again after the election, and if you wear a mask you get laughed at. A gentleman at the Dollar Tree came up and told me I was a sheep and I looked ridiculous. I have a friend who was diagnosed with COVID” who thought it was no problem for her kids to keep going to school.
A third mom in Neosho, Brandi Long, whose youngest son is a high school freshman, believes officials only let kids who’d been exposed to the virus go to school under “pressure from parents who didn’t have anywhere else for their kids to go. Parents get very, very angry around here when sports are canceled. And to be completely honest, a lot of people here don’t believe in it.” Don’t believe that this pandemic is real, much less that it’s now killed 200,000 people in our country. “We have parents telling children this. ‘They’re not going to make you wear a mask.’”
Let families decide to let students go back
Last week, only 48 hours into the “relaxed” new policy, the alternative high school known as the Jefferson Street Campus had to close after one student tested positive and 10 others spiked fevers. And on Monday, after more than one talking-to from state education and health officials, Neosho reversed course, said the school superintendent, Jim Cummins.
Three other Newton County districts — Diamond, Seneca and East Newton — are sticking with it, though. And both Cummins and Larry Bergner, the county health department administrator who wrote the guidelines that let exposed students go back to class, still feel they were right to let families make that decision.
With few kids who were sick but so many in quarantine that Diamond schools briefly closed, Bergner said, “I said, ‘Why don’t we try something — an experiment, if you will — to see if we can keep them in school.’”
Sports “was not a driving factor at all,” he said, even if “there were some parents saying they were missing out on that” by having to quarantine when they weren’t sick.
Many weren’t quarantining properly anyway, Bergner said, and he got a few unhappy calls from parents. “One said, ‘As paranoid as I am about this disease, my child is depressed.’ There was no pressure; the driving factor was the amount of kids staying home. But I heard that similar thing from a few parents, so I thought, why not try it? I put the guidelines together, several schools liked it and we’ll see if it works.” Where it’s still in place, kids can skip quarantine as long as they wear masks, social distance and are monitored at school.
“I did get a lot of positive response” after the announcement, Bergner said. “It might not work, but then again, it might.”
State health officials ‘not supportive’
With a 16% positivity rate in the county as of last week, and 63 COVID patients hospitalized, this loosey-goosey, stream-of-consciousness decision-making process on such an important public health issue could also lead to a lack of bed space, or then again not. Or the loss of lives, or then again not.
The officials who made this call do seem to have gotten a well deserved spanking from both the state health department and the state education department. “The state adopts CDC guidelines, so they were not supportive,” Bergner said. And just how unsupportive were they? “There was some stern conversation.”
