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Photo By Douglas D. Melegari

Pemberton teacher Wil Dirkin contends the Pemberton district’s educational environment is now “the most stressful it has ever been” and that the current circumstances are doing a disservice to students.

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(Continued from Page 1) and “unprepared for how to address this significant shift in COVID protocol.”

Havers, who has been at the helm since last February, and has presided over multiple “crises” which are reportedly continuing unabated, after being publicly confronted by school staff during both the Jan. 20 and Jan. 27 board meetings, apologized for the execution of the decision he made, contending that it was a “mistake” and an “oversight.” The superintendent, however, defended the merits of the “heavy decision” he made, contending it was one that he “did not take lightly.”

And in responding to the pushback that occurred during the Jan. 27 board meeting, Havers declared, all while pointing to the nurses in attendance, “There are certain things that maybe I am not aware of, that you do, to be quite honest.”

Just prior to that remark, teacher Jennifer Soto had called on both the “upper administration” and board members to “roll up their sleeves” and “sub” in the classroom so that the district cannot only finally fill some of the ongoing “coverage gaps” due to staffing shortages, but get a better handle on what is actually occurring in the hallways and classrooms of the district’s schools.

“I guess it is easy to make these calls when you aren’t in the trenches,” declared Soto in slamming the administration. “… I find it interesting that people who never actually taught in our schools during a pandemic are making decisions about how this should be done, but yet ignore input from those of us who have been doing this for two years now.”

Soto, who would later cause Havers to point out he was a teacher for 13 years, maintained district staff have become “exhausted” and that the situation is “untenable.”

“Instead of sitting in offices, you need to start going into the classrooms and doing coverages for teachers who get sick!” Soto asserted.

Rob Horn, president of the Pemberton Township Education Association (PTEA), detailed during the board’s Jan. 20 workshop session that Havers, during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend (one that is very solemnly observed in Pemberton given its significant African American population), reduced the required quarantining for those exposed to the Coronavirus from 10 days to five.

“Speaking of the nurses, who are our healthcare professionals in the trenches, the way these quarantine changes were announced, on a Sunday, on a holiday weekend, the nurses were caught off-guard and were unprepared for how to address this significant shift in COVID protocol,” said Horn as he read from a prepared statement, which he said received unanimous approval from the Representative Council of the PTEA. “They were not advised or consulted about the change. There was no viable plan of action in place Tuesday morning to handle the workload that would accompany this change.

“The nurses have reported to me that Tuesday was chaotic across the district as they had to scramble with minimum guidance to change current quarantines, spending the day dealing with the necessary paperwork, phone calls, and logistical adjustments, having to ignore their normal healthcare responsibilities. Once again, we are taking our dedicated nurses completely for granted, and putting the safety and healthcare of our students in jeopardy, in the process. This is an unacceptable way to navigate an ongoing pandemic.”

Nurse Jennifer Caruso, of Marcus Newcomb Middle School, described on Jan. 27 that the district’s nurses “walked into mayhem” on Jan. 18 and that what occurred “showed an outstanding lack of respect” for them.

“We looked like fools trying to scramble,” declared Caruso, as she looked straight at Havers.

Caruso, in elaborating on that remark, explained that many students who were exposed to COVID had already been assigned a date that they could return to school, based on the prior 10-day protocol that had been in place, but that school nurses found themselves scrambling to notify them of the “changed dates.”

“As your healthcare professionals, we should have input, and it seems like decisions made from the top trickle down to the rest of us,” Caruso added.

The Pine Barrens Tribune previously reported that the school nurses in the beginning of the school year described unsustainable circumstances in which they had to perform contact tracing, in addition to their regular healthcare responsibilities. Several school nurses had described that they were fearful mistakes would be made in administering medications, etc., because of how overwhelmed that they were, and therefore their medical licenses were on the line.

Since then, Havers and the board agreed to hire contact tracers, which Caruso thanked them for doing on Jan. 27, but maintained “it still doesn’t take away the whole COVID burden that is causing problems” and there are “still a lot of problems with communication.”

Caruso detailed that school nurses are still “having difficulties meeting their regular job description,” despite the contract tracers performing contact tracing, because the school nurses are the ones who handle “household contacts and traces” during the school day.

In further elaborating on that point, Caruso explained that when a child becomes symptomatic for COVID during the school day, the nurses then have to “search” for any siblings across the district’s nine schools and also pull them out of class, for fear of possible exposure, and then screen them, call their parents and document what took place.

“It is a ‘search and find mission’ on daily basis that takes an extreme amount of time away from the job,” Caruso contended.

Adding to the burden, she said, is that “we still have to deal with symptomatic students and even teachers,” who have to See SCHOOL/ Page 14