By Ciara Meyer
In Saratoga County, COVID cases rose to new highs in early January, and the Saratoga Springs City School District (SSCSD) is grappling with staffing shortages, student absences, and contact tracing challenges. When surges arise, the central debate remains whether to move temporarily towards remote schooling, but Superintendent Michael Patton prefers other solutions.
“We started the test-to-stay protocol. So, that allows a healthy kid who may have been contact-traced but has not shown symptoms the ability to come to school as long as they have a negative test,” Patton said.
This new policy aims to stop the viral spread in school, per Saratoga County, New York State Department of Health, and CDC guidelines. These guidelines change often but enable students to stay in school longer.
With decreasing isolation times, students are missing less work than in earlier months, even if they do test positive.
Math teacher Mrs. Swift said, “I haven’t had anyone quarantined for so long that they’ve missed more than two or three classes at most.”
High school students face varying levels of difficulty when it comes to catching up. Senior Patrick Kenney was out for a week with COVID.
“I’ve done homework last night and I’ll do some tonight and then I’ll be caught up,” said Kenney three days after his absence.
Junior Ava Mackenzie’s experience was different. Mackenzie said, “I was waiting for a test to come back, and I had to miss a day of school—even missing a day is more than you think.”
Even though students are out for shorter periods, more students have been sick and quarantined than before; therefore, the burden of contact tracing and reteaching material to absent students is larger than ever.
Swift said, “I’ve had more students testing positive this year probably in the past three weeks than I did all last year. I did one contact tracing last year in all my classes. So far [this year] it’s been a lot more than once.”
Not only the students are entering quarantine and isolation with increased frequency. According to the New York State Department of Health, Saratoga County had 12.5% of tests come back positive as of January 22, and with this high number of cases more teachers and staff are out. In addition to staffing issues, Saratoga faces increasing sub shortages. You may walk into a classroom and see a principal standing in front of the Smart Board wrangling a group of students into staying on task.
“In the past, we used to have a pretty good pool of substitutes that could come in,” Patton said. “Those substitutes really just don’t exist anymore, so we’re doing the best that we can to cover where there are gaps.”
Again, this begs the question of whether SSCSD should turn to temporary virtual schooling when cases rise and teachers are absent, but Superintendent Patton is hesitant to turn virtual.
Patton said, “First and foremost we want our kids to have this in-person learning experience, so literally it’s ‘all hands on deck.’”
Administrators missed out on some of their usual duties when they stood in for classes, but Patton has prioritized keeping students in schools, even if that meant other responsibilities are put on pause.
“If we ever have a situation where we have the majority of the staff all out at one time and we don’t have the coverage we would go remote,” Patton said.
Regarding health and safety reasons for going virtual, Patton said, “Public health will let us know if there is ever a case that there’s a need to go remote. This year we haven’t come close to hitting that threshold.”
Some students believe that, whether or not our cases meet the County threshold, temporary virtual learning would be the best path forward. Mackenzie said, “I feel like we should go remote at least for a week just to have everything settled.”
Teachers’ perspectives distanced learning vary, a fact that Swift, as the building representative for Saratoga Springs High School’s branch of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), knows all too well.
“Everybody thinks it’s important for us to be in person,” Swift said, “but there’s a point at which maybe we shouldn’t, and that’s just different for everybody.”
NYSUT’s stance on that breaking point is vague; therefore, it is unlikely that teachers will unite on the matter.
“Despite the appropriate goal of sending all students back to school this winter, if there are logistical issues like the ones I’m hearing about — raging infection rates and related shortages of critical staff — then that school has to be on a temporary pause,” NYSUT President Andy Pallotta stated via NYSUT Communications.
Swift understands that the decision to draw the line poses a challenge. “It’s a matter of what are you weighing. Are you weighing the content of the curriculum or the emotional-social growth of a person?” Swift said.
On the curriculum side, staying in person and enduring student absences often means slowing down, which is only an option in some courses.
“I teach classes that have a very set curriculum—I teach an AP class—but I also teach a class that I can set the curriculum [for], so if I want to slow down I slow down. I can’t do that with the AP curriculum,” Swift said.
Though Patton is willing to differentiate policies class by class in the elementary schools, that simply is not possible in the higher grades where students are on rotating schedules and see different teachers every day. For the middle and high school buildings, it’s a matter of weighing the pros and cons on a school-wide level.
“As long as we can cover the classes,” Patton said, “our goal is to keep kids coming to school.”