Out-of-the-Box Thinking Needed to Safeguard the Community Against Coronavirus

(This is the opinion of site founder Joanne Wallenstein) We’re living in unprecedented times. Each day the news appears more like a doomsday script for a movie I would be too frightened to watch. On the national level, our President is unhinged, he’s dismissed and ignored the experts and mocked science saying anything that doesn’t fit into his playbook is “fake news.”

Up to a month ago, policy on the national level was disheartening, hurt our sensibilities and our pocketbooks but did not threaten our very survival. Now with the outbreak of the highly communicable and possibly fatal COVID-19 or Coronavirus, failures at the national level could have dire consequences on the local level.

We’ve already seen the President contradict the scientists and deny the severity of the threat. We’ve read news reports from those who feared they had the Coronavirus but were unable to get tested as they didn’t meet CDC guidelines – only to later learn that they were infected. Anyone who can read has good reason to be skeptical about the way that our national leaders are handling the outbreak.

So now more than ever, it’s important that we think smart on a local level and call on our Scarsdale leadership and resident experts to safeguard our community. We have a Mayor, Village Manager, Village Board, School Superintendent and School Board who can all make critical decisions in these unusual times.

One of the goals of our school curriculum is to teach critical thinking skills, and now’s the time for these local leaders and our uniquely-qualified residents to analyze the situation, formulate plans and implement them if needed.

Last week Scarsdale faced its first challenge in the crisis when families returned home from the February break. It quickly became known that several families travelled to Milan and skied in Northern Italy where there has been an outbreak of the virus. Another family travelled to South Korea, an area hit hard by the virus.

The CDC recommended that those who spent time in either country in the past 14 days take precautions. Many companies who have employees who travelled to affected regions are requiring them to self quarantine for 14 days before returning to work, even if they are showing no symptoms of the disease, which can take weeks to manifest.

However, our school district has not required students who travelled to Italy or Korea to abstain from attending school. Naturally, parents with children in the classrooms with these returning travelers are concerned. Though the travelers might feel fine now, they may have been exposed and could potentially become ill during the next few weeks and infect others. It is unknown if the disease can be spread before people become symptomatic, but it appears that it might.

Parents questioned the school district and requested that the families who travelled should be encouraged to self-quarantine for the recommended two-week period. Even if it turns out that no one was exposed or infected, this would safeguard the rest of the children -- and the community at large.

The school responded by saying, “School attendance is compulsory under the law,” and said they had no right to “question or monitor where District families travel,” and “do not have the right to impose additional quarantines above the procedures set out by the government.”

Furthermore, “The District has a responsibility to work with the County Department of Health for students exhibiting symptoms and have traveled to China under Education Law 906.1 (This law is explained well in the State Guidance I have linked in the District-wide emails). District nurses have been instructed to seek guidance from the county in any situation when a symptomatic child has traveled to an affected region as the law currently only covers China.”

The school did not change their response when more countries were added to the list. This weekend several airlines suspended flights to Northern Italy, recognizing the difficulty of containing communication of the virus.

According to the district policy, the school nurse is bound to wait for a child to exhibit symptoms before making any recommendations regarding attendance. But as other parents have pointed out, once the child develops symptoms, it’s simply too late to protect others in the school.

The district did agree to reach out to families if they were made aware of travel to affected countries, saying “In instances where the District has information about student or family travel to an affected region, we are reaching out to those families to support them and make sure they are aware of the CDC recommendations.”

This offered little solace to parents who had no way of knowing whether the affected children would be present at school.

We spoke with one very worried mother who contacted Superintendent Thomas Hagerman, Director of Special Education and Student Services Eric Rauschenbach, her school principal and the class teacher to ask if the children who travelled could stay home for two weeks, as recommended by the CDC. All gave her the same response: “There’s nothing we can do.”

Another parent told us that one of the families offered to quarantine themselves for two weeks and were told, “You and your family have done nothing wrong and deserve to return to your normal routine without this type of interruption.”

Where does this leave the balance of the community? What about the rights of others to attend school, free from fear? It seems the only choice for those who are worried is to pull their own children out of school.

This problem is an easy one to solve. Administrators could actively encourage these families to keep their children home rather than run the risk of infecting their classmates. Since there are only a handful of families involved, only a few would be inconvenienced to spare many from potentially catastrophic results.

In this case, instead of doing some out of the box thinking, district administrators appear to have contacted their lawyers and come up with a policy that could work for another type of virus, but not for this one.

As my 84 year-old aunt said, “I have never lived through a pandemic,” and neither have any of us. In order to minimize the risk to everyone in the community, let’s ask our leaders to be flexible and creative and use their critical thinking skills to balance the rights of a few vs. the needs of the community.