Eddie Campbell Jr. had to jot two more entries of inevitability in his pandemic playbook Thursday morning.
That was when superintendent of Monongalia County Schools announced two more positive cases in the district – at the county Technical Education Center and University High, this time – resulting in multiple quarantines.
Twenty students and an instructor at the tech center on Mississippi Street are now isolating, in fact, after a classmate tested positive.
In the meantime, two employees at University High reported the same diagnosis, sending another staffer at the sprawling school on Bakers Ridge into quarantine as a precaution.
Add those to the cases reported earlier this week at Clay-Battelle, Morgantown High and Cheat Lake Elementary, which put more than 30 others (mostly students) into quarantine, also.
The cases are coming in on the first full week of back to blended-learning since November, following Gov. Jim Justice’s executive mandate for in-person instruction.
For his part, Campbell said he isn’t surprised that cases are being notched in Mon’s district.
Not at all.
It’s that aforementioned inevitability factor, the superintendent said.
“We knew all along that we were going to have positive cases,” he said. “That’s just the way it’s going to be for a while.”
“For a while,” as in, until people are fully vaccinated.
“For a while,” as in, until people are fully onboard with mask-wearing, social distancing and all the other pandemic protocols.
Concerning the former, district teachers and other employees 50 years and older are rolling up their sleeves Friday morning for their second shot of the Moderna vaccine, which will happen starting at 8 a.m. at MHS.
As far as the latter, Deputy Superintendent Donna Talerico, who began her career as an elementary school educator, used her teacher’s voice during a board of education meeting earlier this week to put down the edict.
“We’re just gonna have to do these things,” she said.
Not that the district necessarily has to be reminded, Campbell said.
Students and teachers generally mask-up without complaint, he said.
The district’s self-reporting mechanisms – plus a specially designated COVID cleaning crew on call seven days a week to tackle buildings in the shadow of the coronavirus – are why, he said, students and employees are seemingly safer in Mon’s schools than they are the community at large right now.
“We haven’t had case spread from school to school,” the superintendent said.
“That’s important to note, and I can’t stress it enough. The cases we’re dealing with have all been brought in from the outside. I think that speaks volumes to what we’re doing in our school system.”
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