With less than two months to go before annual school-sponsored trips, many officials are either canceling or reconsidering international travel as well as domestic flights – such as the spring visit eighth-grade students make to Washington, D.C. – amid growing concern of the COVID-19 virus.
In Bow, Superintendent Dean Cascadden said the district recently had to cancel a trip planned to Italy during April vacation with a group of around 16 high school students.
“We definitely can’t take that trip this April. It’s now at a Level 3 warning over there,” Cascadden said, referring to the Center for Disease Control precaution that recommends people avoid nonessential travel. More than 50 people had died of coronavirus in Italy, as of Tuesday.
Cascadden said the district is offering another trip to Philadelphia during that time and they had not decided whether to cancel that trip.
Concord’s Interim Superintendent Frank Bass said concern has been expressed about the eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C., a right-of-passage for Concord students who travel to the Smithsonian and American monuments in the nation’s capital. The trip is also scheduled for April vacation. He is corresponding with Rundlett Middle to School Principal Paulette Fitzgerald about how to proceed.
“We’re going to wait and see,” Bass said Tuesday. “At this point, time is on our side – that is not until eight weeks from now and flu season ends around April or so.”
“We will re-evaluate where we’re at around April 1 and see where the tea leaves lead us,” he said.
Bass said the district would have to make a final decision by April 15.
Steve Chamberlin, superintendent for the Hopkinton School District, said there is a trip planned to France in the coming weeks for Hopkinton students. He said district officials are still working to figure out how they will proceed, keeping student safety in mind.
The first person in the state to test positive for COVID-19 was a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center employee who lives in Grafton County and recently returned from a trip to Italy. The news was announced the day students in New Hampshire returned to classes from a week-long February vacation. A second presumptive case of the virus was announced Tuesday and health officials said it was someone known to the original patient.
Schools in the state are taking extra precautions around cleaning, sanitizing doorknobs, handles, countertops, desktops, and other frequented areas on a daily basis as students. Officials are also monitoring students who have recently traveled outside the country during break.
Students from Kearsarge, Timberlane, Winnacunnet who traveled to Italy are being quarantined, Bass wrote in a letter to families sent out Monday.
In a statement posted to Facebook on Sunday, Kearsarge Superintendent Winfried Feneberg said 35 students, as well as staff members who traveled to Europe over February break, will stay home until March 9.
Feneberg said there is “no indication” that the students were exposed to the coronavirus while abroad on the school-sanctioned trip. Feneberg said officials have decided to take action “out of an abundance of caution.”
Students who stay home will be able to stay in touch with their teachers online to keep up with their studies and will not be marked absent, Feneberg said in the statement.
Many schools were coming up with contingency plans in case a student or staff member tested positive for the virus.
“If we do end up with a student who comes down with the disease, what we’re going to do is quarantine that student and their siblings off school grounds for a period of at least 14 days,” Bass said.
Bass said the district would notify state authorities and shut the schools down for a day or two for sanitization. He said district officials have been monitoring schools’ response to the virus in the west coast, where the disease has been more prevalent.
“We are learning from them in terms of how to deal with these issues,” he said.
Jake Leon, spokesperson for the Department of Heath and Human Services and Lindsay Pierce, chief of infectious disease prevention and investigation for the state visited a Concord School Board meeting Monday night.
“This is a rapidly evolving situation, it has been for close to two months now,” Leon said. “What’s important for us at the department right now is not that this is the first case and not that we were expecting it, but given the nature of this virus and how fast it has spread around the globe, it is not unexpected to be here in New Hampshire.”
Leon said the department was able to conduct the test that was positive at a New Hampshire lab instead of sending it out to the CDC to get tested, as they have been doing. The lab in New Hampshire took hours to turn around results, instead of days, like the CDC takes.
The CDC is still doing their own test to confirm the results of the New Hampshire lab.
School leaders said they would keep parents posted about upcoming school organized travel.
Mark MacLean, superintendent of the Merrimack Valley school system, said this middle school’s eighth grade Washington, D.C. trip isn’t until next fall.
“Fortunately, we have time to prepare,” he said.
Cascadden said he had a meeting planned for Tuesday night with parents of students who had planned to travel to Italy and the travel company to discuss logistic and financial options.
“We have a number of kids who have signed up, paid deposits,” Cascadden said. “Now, we need to come up with the best option for getting money back.”
Cascadden said the district had also planned to offer a trip to China during April vacation in 2021. No students have signed up for the trip so far, Cascadden said, and school officials will continue monitor the situation.