Parents upset about student quarantines
Lack of a bus seating chart prompts confusion
ELKINS — Parents are complaining about some students being quarantined after a Randolph County Schools bus driver tested positive for COVID-19.
Last week, the Randolph-Elkins Health Department confirmed that two RCS employees had tested positive, resulting in several students being quarantined.
“Out of an abundance of caution and following direction from the West Virginia Division of Infectious Disease and Epidemiology (DIDE), the health department worked with the superintendent of Randolph County Schools to identify children with increased risk and provide quarantine guidelines to their parents,” a Randolph-Elkins Health Department release stated on Sept. 15.
Several parents contacted The Inter-Mountain after the quarantines began. The Inter-Mountain received an email from a parent on Sept. 15 stating that her child’s bus driver had tested positive for COVID-19 and that the Randolph Board of Education called her the night before saying her child had to be quarantined for 14 days. The parent said the driver picks up students from Midland Elementary, Elkins Middle School and Elkins High School.
A second parent called The Inter-Mountain on Sept. 16 saying his daughter had been quarantined for 14 days along with every other student who rides her bus.
“My daughter can’t play sports for two weeks,” he said. “She can’t see her friends for two weeks. She can’t go to school. She can’t have a life.”
The parent said he believes his daughter shouldn’t have been quarantined, as she was assigned a seat near the back of the bus, and she only passed the bus driver momentarily while entering and departing the bus, with both of them wearing masks each day.
“Going by the guidelines we’ve all been given, those seconds they would be within six feet of each other wouldn’t be enough time for contamination, with them both wearing masks,” he said.
“Why was she and everyone else in the back of the bus quarantined?”
The parent said he pursued an answer all the way up to the state Division of Infectious Disease and Epidemiology.
“They told me that during their investigation, Randolph County Schools could not provide them with a seating chart for my daughter’s bus, so all the kids on the bus had to be quarantined,” he said.
“We’re two days into the school year and the seating chart can’t be found.
“I had to sign a piece of paper before school started agreeing for her to have an assigned seat on the bus,” he said. “Assigned bus seats was one of the reasons they gave for pushing the start of school back to Sept. 8.”
Randolph County Superintendent of Schools Debbie Schmidlen confirmed to The Inter-Mountain that an assigned seating chart for the bus could not be provided to health officials.
“So the health department directed us to quarantine all of the students on the bus,” she said.
“Bus drivers are required to submit seating charts,” she added. “The first couple weeks of school, kids are coming on and off the bus. So bus drivers don’t necessarily have seating charts on the second day of school, and they may not even have one at the end of the first week.
“But they are required to submit one.”
The parent also said he was told by the first RCS employee he spoke to that the drive of his daughter’s bus had been displaying symptoms the first week of school but still showed up for work.
He said that, in the days between his daughter last riding the school bus and when the quarantines were announced, “my daughter had around all her friends, her athletic teammates, and now they’re all potentially exposed.”
He also alleged that RCS bus drivers have been told to take their own temperatures at home before coming to work, rather than having their temperatures taken when they show up at the county bus garage each work day.
“It’s like the honor system for bus drivers,” he said. “That’s just not going to cut it.”
Schmidlen responded by telling The Inter-Mountain that temperatures of “employees at schools are taken when they come in. Bus drivers are just simply told to self-monitor. They have not been required, but we have told them that they need to self-monitor to make sure they don’t have symptoms.
“If an employee reports to us that they are having symptoms, then we tell them that they need to be off work and they need to go seek medical attention,” she said.
“And the symptoms we base that on are the symptoms that are designated to us in the tool kit that is provided to us from the state, he tool kit that we use when making determinations for when children or adults should not be in school or working.
“And there are different symptoms that we look for, and that’s when they’re provided to us. If they come to us and say ‘I have this, this and this,’ then we say you need to go seek medical attention.”