North Carolina's leaders Tuesday issued a bipartisan call for all local school districts to open in-person classes. "It's time to get our children back
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The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported more than 400 school-age children in Mecklenburg County tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
Updated 10 a.m.
The state reports that just over 400 school-age children in Mecklenburg County tested positive for COVID-19 last week. But Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, which serves almost three-quarters of that population, reported only 37 student cases that week. That had school board members questioning the effectiveness of contact tracing Tuesday.
Linking COVID-19 cases to CMS is complicated by the fact that middle and high schools have been in remote learning since March. Elementary and K-8 schools returned in the fall, but have been in remote mode since shortly before winter break.
A socially distanced third-grade class at Cotswold Elementary before CMS returned to fully remote instruction.
When Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools resumes in-person classes, there will be racial differences in who goes back and who chooses to stay home.
CMS recently released racial breakdowns on the students whose parents have enrolled them in Full Remote Academy. Those numbers show that about three-quarters of the district s 36,000 white students will return to in-person classes second semester a significantly higher percentage than other racial groups.
CMS has about 51,000 Black students, who are split almost evenly between in-person classes and staying in remote instruction second semester.
The racial implications of those choices have been debated for weeks.
After returning to the classroom with a hybrid/in-person approach in September, cases of coronavirus began appearing among staff and/or students in all of Burlington’s classrooms. To date, it is not believed that transmission has occurred in classrooms, but was brought into the buildings from another source of transmission. It is the practice of the Burlington public schools to close a classroom for two weeks and notify close contacts of the infected person.
Customers were getting accustomed to the new way of food shopping – wearing masks and lining up outside the supermarket, separated by 6 feet of social distancing. When a Market Basket employee became infected, readers wrote to the Union to advocate for plexiglass dividers to protect workers, which quickly became the norm.
It was mid-August. The playgrounds of Brookline, Massachusetts, had finally reopened, and so the news spread fast. Sharon Abramowitz had resigned from the school committee. If a lab wanted to manufacture a school committee member to help the 7,800-student Brookline School District through the COVID crisis, it probably would’ve ended up with Abramowitz. The sociologist-anthropologist-epidemiologist had studied Ebola, written interagency guidelines about what community engagement should look like during a crisis, and, after the district shut down in March, spent 40 hours a week in volunteer meetings on Zoom trying to make a safe reopening feasible. But now she was moving full time to her second home in Vermont.