Boston schools boost COVID prevention efforts with $3 million in additional funding

Nurses and parents of Boston Public School students say they are alarmed that COVID-19 cases are rising rapidly in the district, but its contact tracing, designed to notify infected students and their close contacts, has been spotty or nonexistent.

COVID cases in BPS nearly tripled in the week ending Dec. 8, rising from 123 to 345 new infections. The district hired a contractor on Nov. 1 to improve its contact tracing program, but school nurses say that's not happening.

After weeks of complaints and the emergency closure of the Curley School in Jamaica Plain when a COVID outbreak there grew out of control, the district will soon announce increased spending on COVID prevention, a Boston Public Schools spokeswoman told GBH News Monday evening.

The new funds inculde $3 million to expand contact tracing, hire two managers to oversee operations and add contract nurses at schools that don’t have one. The district also said it has added 27 new contact tracers and will offer a stipend for a testing and contact tracing coordinator at every school.

Brighton High School nurse Lauren O’Malley-Singh said she was relieved that the district will take much-needed action. She said she was recently on a group call with district and public health officials when a nurse at the Mario Umana Academy in East Boston raised concerns that contact tracing was taking several days and allowing positive cases to remain in classrooms. The school reported 15 positive cases in the week ending Dec. 8, more than any other school in the city.

Contact tracing is “happening with such a delay that it's not helpful and it's not safe,” O’Malley-Singh said. “You’d think that we'd be prioritizing these most vulnerable communities that were being hit the hardest.”

O'Malley-Singh's concerns echo those of school nurses in other vulnerable Boston neighborhoods last week, according to emails between school nurses obtained by GBH News.

“We reported cases last week. Nothing has been done,” a school nurse in Mattapan wrote to union colleagues last week.

“I’m truly just stunned by this whole thing and I feel like we need to do something,” wrote another school nurse at a Roxbury school. “This is an emergency.”

“20% of one of my [early kindergarten classes] is positive as of today,” a Dorchester school nurse wrote, wondering at what point she would be authorized to quarantine a class.

Bevin Kenney, a mother of two BPS students who is also a doctor, said parents are so concerned about the problems and lack of city response they have formed a group called “Families for COVID Safety.” Members of the group have asked for an investigation by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We’re causing undue harm when we have tools that can combat this,” Kenney said of the contact tracing problems. “It just seems like the height of sort of hubris to kind of be like, ‘Oh, well, you know, everything’s fine. And now, we need to be in school, period.’ But both are true… we need [kids] to be at school and everything's not fine.”

The district has previously blamed staffing shortages for the problems. It retained HealthCareIT Leaders, based near Atlanta, on Nov. 1 to expand its contact tracing efforts. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Parents and nurses are also critical of pool testing, the state-sponsored program of collecting nasal swab samples in batches weekly to identify positive cases. That is funded by the state and conducted by its vendor, Cambridge-based CIC Health.

They question whether the pool testing program offers an accurate sense of infections present in the schools if participation rates in the program are low. Parents have to opt into the program, and some nurses say only a third to half of the students participate at some schools.

BPS said it does not have an accurate district-wide participation rate at this time, but GBH News reported that the participation rate was just 22 percent last April.

Deidre Habershaw, a Dorchester mother of three, said she’s disturbed by the lack of proactive steps taken so far to make schools safe. In her household, three of the six members are at high risk for COVID complications, including her 4-year-old with severe asthma and his 70-year-old grandparent.

“I signed the children up for pool testing, as a proactive preventative measure, sort of like a trip wire for our household,” she said. “But the enrollment isn't high enough. And the contact tracing isn't proactive enough. It just doesn't happen fast enough to catch cases.”

One of Habershaw's daughters already tested positive this fall. She had her tested after the daughter casually mentioned that as many as 10 kids in her class were absent. Habershaw was never notified by the school.

“I don't know enough about what the resource issue is. I don't know if it's they don't have enough personnel or the manpower to process tests,” she said, “but we're just not being proactive enough about it.”

Katie Kearney Abbet, a parent of a third-grader at the Joseph P. Manning School in Jamaica Plain, said she never received a call from a contact tracer, even though her daughter was a close contact of an infected student. Abbet heard about her daughter’s exposure from the child’s parent directly.

City and district officials had a meeting with parents at the Manning earlier this year after an outbreak at the school. When parents complained about inadequate communication about case numbers and close contacts, health officials said they didn’t want to create a panic among parents.

“It made me really angry,” Abbet said. “I'm perfectly capable of figuring out for myself what's safe and not safe for my child, if I have all the information. But when they're worried more about messaging than… being honest and transparent, that definitely creates more panic.”

Abbet said that also makes her deeply concerned about what’s happening in schools with fewer resources like school nurses.

The district's problems controlling the spread of COVID don’t appear to be limited to the schools. BPS administrative buildings had one of the biggest increases in case numbers last week, with a dozen confirmed cases. The administrative operations have also had more positive COVID cases than nearly every school in the district, with 43 confirmed cases so far this year.