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Date: 12/21/2020
WESTFIELD – With COVID-19 cases and close contacts on the rise across the district, Westfield Public Schools will shift to remote learning from Dec. 18 to Jan. 19.
As a result of the rising cases and contacts, Superintendent of Schools Stefan Czaporowski said it was impossible to properly conduct contact tracing.
“Essentially a couple of our schools had some cases where a significant amount of staff members and students were identified as close contacts. We had some positive cases but then once we started doing contract tracing, the numbers were pretty large,” he said.
As an example, Czaporowski said students at the middle school and high school go between classes with different students so the virus could quickly spread.
“For example, a student at the middle school or the high school traveling to seven different classes, often times with different students, so there is a possibility that all of those students could be close contacts, including the staff members,” he said.
Along with rising cases and contacts in the schools, cases are also on the rise in the city.
“It’s becoming more commonplace in the community. We’re back in the red and I think our positivity rate is over 5.6 percent now and we saw over 200 new cases last week. With the holidays coming up we did see a little spike in Westfield and in our schools after Thanksgiving,” he said.
Czaporowski said one of the biggest factors in the rising contacts and cases is students attending in person learning while they are sick.
“The direct cause is really families sending sick and symptomatic children to school that then tested positive. In our reopening plan we said the number one thing is if you have student who is symptomatic, please do not send them to school,” he said.
While he said he did not want to make the decision to go remote, Czaporowski said the district was prepared to do so if necessary.
“We had sent students home with some materials for the snow day yesterday. Today a lot of the day is asynchronous meaning students are doing work assigned through Google Classroom because our teachers are grabbing their materials from the classroom so they can teach through Jan. 19,” he said.
Even though the shift to remote learning lasts until Jan. 19, Czaporowski explained that for two of the weeks, the district will be on its winter recess.
“Almost two of those weeks are our holiday recess anyway. So, it really isn’t as long because we’ll be home for the holidays,” he said.
By keeping students home through the holidays, Czaporowski said that gives the district time in case cases continue to rise.
“With people blatantly disregarding the guidelines at Thanksgiving, we figured it’s probably going to be similar for Christmas and New Year’s, so we’re giving it a couple weeks after that to work itself out,” he said.
Once schools reopen, Czaporowski said the best way to keep them open is by keeping sick children at home.
“I want to reiterate with families that if we want to keep our schools open, the biggest piece of it, we can’t send sick kids to school, that has become our concern. As a community, I think that’s something we can get a handle on if everyone just follows that,” he said.
Czaporowski said shutting down schools for in person learning was not a decision he wanted to make.
“I can’t express my disappointment enough the fact that we had to go this route. It was a very hard decision to make and I didn’t want to make that decision, but once I started to see the close contact numbers going up, it just made sense to the right thing here. To make this decision breaks my heart a little bit; I don’t want to do this,” he said.