BARRE — A persistent staffing shortage, which has had school districts around the region on yellow alert since classes resumed in late-August, reached a tipping point in two of them on Monday.
A lack of staff shuttered Spaulding High School in Barre for the day and prompted the noon dismissal of students from U-32 Middle and High School in nearby East Montpelier.
Both decisions were made early Monday morning based on a fresh wave of staff absences — some involving cases of COVID-19.
Administrators in both the Barre Unified Union School District, which is home to Spaulding, and the Washington Central Unified Union School District, which is anchored by U-32, were scrambling Monday to patch together a plan to make sure what was always supposed to be a short week for students didn’t get any shorter.
Thursday is a staff development day at Spaulding, and Friday and Monday — Indigenous People’s Day — are both vacation days. At U-32, and the rest of Washington Central, Friday is a scheduled in-service day heading into the three-day holiday weekend.
In an email to parents that went out after some students had been dropped off at Spaulding, Barre Superintendent Chris Hennessey explained the decision to close the high school — one that didn’t effect either of the district’s centralized elementary schools, the Spaulding-based Central Vermont Career Center, or its off-campus program for special needs students on Allen Street.
Like most surrounding districts, the one in Barre has been understaffed since school opened and Hennessey noted, what he characterized as a “significant increase in student and staff absences due to illness” district-wide exacerbated a problem, which was most pronounced at Spaulding, late last week.
“The (Spaulding) community has been hit particularly hard since late last week, and it became clear very early this morning that despite every possible effort we simply would not have enough people on hand to safely open,” Hennessey wrote, adding: “We have been seeing a combination of an uptick in COVID cases along with a variety of other bugs that are keeping people out across the district.”
Hennessey indicated he expected to have information about whether and under what conditions classes and after-school activities would resume at Spaulding later today, but stressed the decision to close the high school on Monday was carefully considered.
“Closing school for any reason is always an incredibly difficult decision to make, and I want to assure you that we take such decisions very seriously,” he wrote. “Going forward, we will continue to take a ‘day to day’ approach and only close schools or specific classes and grades if absolutely necessary.”
COVID-19 wasn’t responsible for all of the absences, but it was responsible for some of them. The Barre district is following state guidelines, which suggest anyone who tests positive be out of school for five days before returning.
That is a consideration in Washington Central, where Superintendent Meagan Roy said U-32 was in the same boat as Spaulding from a staffing perspective, prompting her decision to dismiss students at noon and regroup.
Roy said the short day gave students at least some “face time” with teachers, will count as an attendance day — Spaulding’s won’t — and gave administrators the afternoon to regroup and decide what to do Tuesday.
While the prescription varied slightly between the region’s two largest high schools, the symptoms were essentially the same, and Roy said can be traced to what has been a chronic problem.
“We are … understaffed on a normal day,” she said, suggesting that problem is “acute” at U-32, as well as the district’s for pre-K-6 elementary schools.
Roy said COVID was partly, but far from solely responsible for her decision to send U-32 students home early on a day when there were more than 40 uncovered classes across the 7-12 school.
“The problem is our staffing level is so razor-thin that we can’t weather the typical staff absences that happen this time of year,” she said, noting the “multiple-day absences” required for those testing positive for COVID are an added complication.
When your “baseline” is “not fully staffed,” Roy said any absences are difficult to absorb and a sudden slug of them pose the kind of logistical challenge she and U-32 administrators planned to discuss Monday afternoon in hopes students could return to school today.
“The goal, obviously, is to have kids in school,” she said, noting that what seems plausible on any given evening could look very different the next morning.
Roy said part of the longer term solution may require more aggressively marketing with an eye toward assembling a robust list of substitute teachers.
“On any given day we have a lot of coverage to do, and that’s on a normal day,” she said.
david.delcore
@timesargus.com
