SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) — During the COVID-19 pandemic, many Syracuse-area schools have switched to some form of online learning. Schools have students taking class in-person some days and going online for others. North Syracuse Central School District, however, had to make a little bit of a change this past week.
A bus driver’s positive COVID-19 test led the District to switch all kindergarten through 12th grade students to remote learning on Tuesday. Fourteen other drivers were exposed and forced to quarantine, according to Associate Superintendent of Business Don Keegan.
“All of our contact tracing happened over the long weekend, ” Keegan said. “We had to communicate with bus drivers, we had to communicate with the Department of Health, and we needed the time to make sure that we did the contact tracing properly.”
The District used the long weekend to also contact substitute drivers to take over for the 15 that were exposed.
The district has approximately 8,000 students. About 2,000 are fully online this semester. The other 6,000 attend hybrid classes. Supplying for a large number of students led the district to be concerned that the new bus driver schedule could be flawed.
“We said, ‘Let’s just take a day, and make sure that all our ducks are in a row, and that we’re all ready to resume in-person classes on Thursday,” Keegan said.
Keegan believed the driver became infected outside of district facilities. He said the others became exposed after work a few weeks ago.
“They were outside of a school building, and they were not right on top of each other,” Keegan said. “They were probably four feet apart, not six feet. They are a group of people that are friends and have worked together for years, and they probably just let their guard down a little bit.”
Wednesday was a planned, district-wide online day. Students returned to in-person classes on Thursday.
