Teacher ’s union president wants WVU stats to stay in the county COVID-19 numbers
You can take the COVID out of the metric – but you can’t take the metric out of Morgantown and Monongalia County.
Dale Lee said that, as he stood under a pavilion at White Park while the off-and-on rain came down.
Lee, who is president of the West Virginia Education Association, a leading teacher’s union in the state, was in town to defend Mon County Schools, even offering to help give the district a day in court, if necessary.
He offered, on behalf of the union, to file an injunction – with the district – to give the local school system more of a say as it tries to conduct learning in the face of a pandemic.
The first day of school is Tuesday, and the county will likely begin the year via remote-learning, as per the new coronavirus map fronted by the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Mon is currently showing orange on the map, after an upsurge of cases that many attribute to the return of WVU students to the city for the fall term.
There have been 92 cases in the university since Aug. 27, and Gov. Jim Justice responded in part by again clamping down on area bars.
He ordered all of them in the city and county closed – they had just been opened two days’ prior – after photographs circulating on social media showed lines of young people, mostly without masks or social distancing, lining up to get in to such an establishment.
The WVU students not being allowed in the bars, though, means the students of Monongalia County Schools probably won’t be allowed in buildings come Tuesday,
For the first week of school, at least.
Pandemic partying
City and county officials are also working to designate WVU as a COVID entity unto itself, saying its numbers are corrupting the far lesser rates of positive cases away from campus and into the community.
Lee, though, disagreed.
University students have leases on apartments in Morgantown, he said.
They have part-time jobs at businesses in Morgantown, and they shop at stores in Morgantown.
They also get together and drink, the president said – “When you’re 19 and 20, that’s what you do.”
Lee said the university numbers can’t be apart from the metric because the university is interwoven into the civic fabric of Morgantown.
Mon’s school system originally wanted to go totally remote for the first nine weeks of the term, but Gov. Jim Justice overruled – saying students should be in front of their actual teachers, in their actual classrooms, at least part of the time.
The coronavirus, as others have said, doesn’t care about keggers.
What Lee would hope to gain legal action is a measure of control for Mon.
Whether students go to school, or learn from home, shouldn’t be dictated by four colors on a map, he said.
Four colors, in black and white
Like those raindrops Thursday, COVID-19 cases in Morgantown are really going to pick up and fall off, which he says will generate a storm of chaos and uncertainty from one week to the next, depending upon what hue the map glows.
The local county, Lee said, should have the control back that it built into its original re-entry plan.
“If Monongalia County is in the orange or the red, they should be the ones to make the decision on how long they’re going to the remote learning, whether it’s four weeks or nine weeks,” he said.
“It shouldn’t be a flip-flop measure where you’re orange this week, you’re yellow next week, you’re red the following week, then you drop back to orange.”
Class discussion
Campbell, meanwhile, continued his praise of WVU, saying that the university, despite the behaviors of some of its population, is still doing a good job in face of something no school administration, on any level, has experienced until now.
The superintendent said he’d rather wait to since if the governor gives some of the breathing room Lee is railing for – rather than resulting to legal fisticuffs.
Heather Deluca-Nestor agreed.
Deluca-Nestor, a science teacher at South Middle, is president of Mon’s WVEA chapter.
Right now, she said, her union is trying to stay measured and steadfast, at the same time.
“I have had schools reach out to me and tell me they are ready to walk or we need a ‘blue flu’ on Tuesday,” she said.
“The bottom line is, because someone might not be willing to strike doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with the current plan. They really do have their students’ best interests at heart.”
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