12 minute read
Cover / School fight back
from March 2021
by ASBA
Cover / Schools fight back
Schools fight back
In Saline County, pharmacists collaborated to vaccinate teachers and staff at five area school districts in an effort to defeat the virus and get back to normal
By Steve Brawner Editor
John Goff says it’s hard to teach math to Bryant Junior High students virtually. He needs to see their faces and their sheets of paper when they’re working a problem. Full-time sub Amy DeVito has already had COVID but wants her fellow teachers to be vaccinated to protect her third-grade daughter. And Bryant High offensive line and wrestling coach Shane Clancy is simply “ready to ditch the mask and just be normal.”
All three didn’t hesitate to be vaccinated at a pair of events organized by local pharmacies for Saline County-area schools: Bryant, Benton, Bauxite and Harmony Grove, along with nearby Glen Rose in Hot Spring County. About 1,200 school employees received their second shots Feb. 13 at the River Center gymnasium after receiving their first shots Jan. 23.
The events were administered by a collaboration of six area pharmacies who worked with the Department of Health and the Saline County Office of Emergency Management to coordinate the event. Each pharmacy was assigned a different school district, with two in charge of Bryant, the largest district with the most participants. School employees were given the vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech.
“We’re actually really close anyways,” said Jon Martin, owner of Bryant Family Pharmacy. “We all work together on a lot of different projects. So when the state moved to [Phase] 1-B and said the educators would fall into 1-B, we all pooled together all of our resources, went together, started working as a team, as a group, to coordinate this event.”
Martin was the contact with the Bryant School District because he already had a good relationship with the superintendent, Dr. Karen Walters. He asked her what she thought about a countywide effort. She helped coordinate the event with the other school districts.
Martin said big events make it easier to vaccinate a lot of people. The first event on Jan. 23 lasted all day with no hiccups, but the second event was accomplished in half a day. Recipients were screened at the door. After the shot, they were asked to sit for 15 minutes for observations.
Martin estimated that he has administered 300-500 shots since the pandemic began, and his pharmacy has administered thousands. Some people have been sick afterwards for a few hours, some for a day or so, and some had no reaction at all. He personally had a sore arm after his first shot and, after the second, a sore arm along with a fever that lasted a few days.
“Nobody’s had any serious reactions,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of people that had responses to getting the shot – to actually getting the shot, anxiety related, but nobody’s had anything related to the vaccination itself.”
Walters was pleased with how the events have gone.
“I don’t think it could go any better,” she said. “Things are so smooth. There’s no wait. I told Jon that Governor Hutchinson needs to ask him what it would cost for him to run every clinic in the state of Arkansas because Jon, he’s got it down to a well-oiled machine.”
Walters said her school district sent emails to staff and provided information from the Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The district has recommended employees be vaccinated but has not required it. She estimated that close to 70% of the staff had chosen to get vaccinated, with teachers probably closer to 77% and classified staff in the lower 60s.
Administrators made it clear there would be no repercussions for those who declined to be vaccinated. However, Walters has told staff that current leave policy will last only through June 30. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released guidance saying employees who have been vaccinated do not have to be quarantined after a close contact if they show no symptoms, and Bryant could incorporate that guidance into next year’s policies.
JOHN GOFF, a math teacher at Bryant Junior High School, gets vaccinated for COVID-19 at the Benton Riverside Park Feb. 13. Local pharmacies collaborated to organize two events for five Saline and Hot Spring County schools.
Decliners offered a variety of reasons. Some people’s doctors had recommended against doing it. An office employee has anaphylactic reactions to vaccines. Some of her district’s pregnant employees chose to take it, while others did not. For some people, the speed with which the vaccine was approved and produced was a concern. Some had already had COVID but experienced only mild symptoms and didn’t feel like they needed the vaccine. Some didn’t take the vaccine the first time because they had COVID or were under quarantine. A few were out town when the events occurred.
“I’ve had a couple of people tell me, ‘Well, you know, I know people that had it and it wasn’t that bad, and I don’t want to find out later that the vaccine has side effects that we don’t know about. I’m going to take my chance,’” Walters said.
Harmony Grove and Glen Rose saw similar rates of participation among their school personnel, said their superintendents. Harmony Grove’s Heath Bennett said administrators talked to teachers and staff members about the vaccine and explained that getting vaccinated was their choice. Likewise, Glen Rose made it an option, said Superintendent Tim Holicer.
“We just made sure that everybody knew it was available. … It’s strictly up to them,” Holicer said. “I mean, what I think personally is, why wouldn’t you? But that’s Tim. They’ve got to make up their own minds.”
Holicer and his wife had COVID at Thanksgiving. He felt a little bad over a weekend and wouldn’t have even tested if he hadn’t lost his sense of smell. His first shot resulted in a headache that lasted a couple of days, and his arm was a little sore. He said he had never felt any side effects from previous vaccinations. Bennett said his throat hurt, and he felt chills after his first shot. After his second shot that morning, he had felt a little woozy for the first hour but was already feeling better when he talked to Report Card.
Bennett appreciated the local pharmacists’ efforts in getting everyone vaccinated at once.
“If we would have tried to do this and just gone through each individual school district, there’s no telling how long it possibly would have taken, but with the help and teamwork and just everybody coming together, it’s been amazing,” he said.
Goff, the Bryant Junior High School mathematics teacher, had no hesitancy in taking the shot. He said he has a degree in physics and understands the biology involved with the vaccine. His wife volunteered to be part of the testing for the vaccine produced by Moderna. She ended up in the placebo group and then later was given an early vaccination. “I understand that the vaccine has been developed by a very robust scientific community, and so I don’t think that there’s an issue with trusting in what’s going to happen,” he said.
Goff said this past year has been “probably the hardest year I’ve ever taught since my first year.” His dad died last year from non-COVID causes. He’s diabetic, so he’s aware of the greater risks he faces. He’s tried to take precautions in class, and students have been understanding, but there’s only so much that can be done. He doesn’t have any full-time virtual students, but he does have students going in and out of quarantine. Zoom sessions with 10 students are especially challenging for a math teacher. He needs to see the light bulb go off when a student understands a problem. He also needs to look at the sheet of paper to see how they’re working it.
“I believe as much as possible we are getting the standards taught, but it’s a much slower process,” he said. “It’s much, much slower. We don’t get as much accomplished in virtual as we do in class. We don’t get as much feedback. Like, the facial feedback – there’s a lot to that, and there’s a lot to being in the same room and getting sort of the oneon-one interaction in the same environment that you don’t get, and you feel like you’re missing out on some things.”
Clancy, who coaches the Bryant Hornets’ offensive line and is the school’s head wrestling coach, was among those vaccinated. Bryant won its third straight
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state championship in football this year, staying on the field by following the rules and keeping things sanitized, he said. There have been no outbreaks on the wrestling team, either.
DeVito was also glad to be vaccinated, even though she’d already had COVID at the end of September. Her case, she said, was mild to moderate, with a loss of taste and smell along with a cough and fever. This is her first year as a full-time substitute teacher at Hurricane Creek Elementary after subbing part-time in previous years. She goes to work every day and then is sent to whatever class needs a teacher, or she works in the office.
“I have a third-grader at our school, and it makes me happy to see all the teachers here getting vaccinated to keep our kids safe, too,” she said.
Like other districts, the challenge for Bryant this school year has been both the number of cases and the quarantining. On February 13, about 320 students and staff members were quarantined. Just before Christmas, more than 900 were quarantined out of 9,300 students and 1,100 staff members. Ninety-two of those cases were positive. Jamie Sheffield, a special ed teacher at Bethel Middle School, passed away in early December. The deputy superintendent’s eighth grade daughter is on her fourth quarantine. Walters herself had to be quarantined after visiting her daughter, a social worker in a nursing home, the week of Thanksgiving, but she never got sick.
Walters said staff members have done well during a difficult and stressful time. Some good teachers retired. The district tries to be careful and has removed furniture and shelves from rooms so students can spread out, but there are classrooms where they cannot be six feet apart. Despite the challenges, staff members have maintained the same standards with the same expectations for academic rigor, and she was encouraged by scores in the district’s second round of NWEA testing. And it’s not just teachers. Lunchroom personnel are sending home meals with students, and custodians are sanitizing the school. “It’s been more work for everybody, but everybody has stepped up to the plate,” she said. “I couldn’t be more pleased with how they have performed under pressure.”
Bryant chose to give students two options: virtual full-time or on-site fulltime, with nothing in-between. About 25% chose the virtual option during the first semester, but that number fell after Christmas to 21%. Walters said younger students especially need five days a week of instruction, and it’s a hardship for parents when schools are not open five days.
Walters is squarely in the camp of having students on site. Students were happy to be back when schools opened last fall. She said students need to be around peers to learn social interactions, and elementary students need to learn phonics in person. Supports and therapies are not the same virtually.
“And we have some students that we need them to be at school so that we know that they’re OK,” she said. “They’re in situations that if there’s not somebody outside checking on them, there could be some bad things happen. So I’m a firm believer, we need them to be on site.”
Furthermore, she estimates that 10% of her virtual students aren’t logging in and fully participating in their studies. With 1,500 virtual students, that’s 150 who are falling through the cracks. She said the state needs a structure where juvenile judges can declare students in those situations absent. Her district plans next year to offer virtual courses realizing that if it doesn’t, it will lose students. (“The horse has left the barn, and I don’t think it’s coming back,” she said.) For elementary students, virtual classes are being discouraged but nevertheless are being made available. Virtual secondary students will attend Buzz Academy after completing an application process. Students who didn’t have good attendance this year won’t be able to choose that option.
Few students at rural Glen Rose have chosen the virtual option this year. Out of 1,000 students, about 30 are virtual, and those are doing OK, Holicer said. The challenge has been with students going in and out of quarantine. He agrees with Walters that most students do better on site.
“I would be shocked if you could find an administrator that wouldn’t agree with that now that we’ve seen what can happen to a gigantic percentage of our kids. … Some kids don’t need somebody over them the majority of the time that they’re trying to learn. That’s wonderful. But I can’t find anybody in Saline and Hot Spring County that they have a large group of that,” he said.
After schools were closed during the spring 2020 semester and were disrupted this school year, everyone is hoping next school year will be normal, and that includes Walters. However, she believes students and staff will still be wearing masks this fall, and her district is preparing by purchasing personal protective equipment. She’s hoping more fans can be in the stands, and she’s hoping she won’t have to do so much contact tracing. This year she has two full-time staff members engaged in that task.
Her people, she said, are tired but resilient. They’ll keep showing up for work to help students learn. If next year is like this year, they can do it. But she hopes they don’t have to.
“This is one of those things I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m afraid it’s going to go on through the calendar year,” she said. “I just don’t think they’re going to be able to get the general public vaccinated. And that’s the key piece for us getting back to some normalcy.”
