Entire classrooms were sent home and told to quarantine due to a single classmate with a single symptom and no infection as one Washington, D.C.-area school district opened under draconian new rules.
The first week of school in Montgomery County, Maryland, saw 1,000 students, faculty, and staff sent home to quarantine thanks to last-minute rules promulgated after students had already returned to the classroom.
The rules laid out that any “single symptom” should be presumptively treated as COVID-19 and result in the quarantine of that “sick” student and all of his or her close classmates.
In practice, this meant entire classes being sent home for one complaint about a headache.
My second grader has – kid in class said they had a headache less than an hour after coming to school today so they sent the entire class home to quarantine for up to 10 days.
— Gary (@GTLombardo) September 8, 2021
My child’s entire class was quarantined. The classmate also had a headache (per my conversation with the mom, the school only said “symptom”). I will email you, and happy to discuss further!
— Nikki Gillum Posnack (@NikkiPosnack) September 8, 2021
County officials in a Wednesday news briefing disagreed that their rule required such action. A single symptom, argued outgoing county health officer Travis Gayles, who issued the rule, should trigger a COVID-19 process. If there is another diagnosis to explain the symptom, such as motion sickness causing a kid to vomit upon disembarking a school bus, then the student and the close contacts shouldn’t have to quarantine.
That’s obviously not how the rule was interpreted by teachers and principals in the county. Classes were sent home due to a single symptom in a single student, and parents were told the class could not return until a negative test was returned.
As County Executive Marc Elrich summarized the rule: “If they’ve got any symptom of COVID, which, if you look at the list of symptoms would be anything you feel on a normal day except absolutely perfect, you have to go home, and they start looking at who has to be quarantined based on close contact.”
The new rules were not made public until the middle of the first week of school.
The rules dictate that schools must send home for quarantine any student “displaying any single symptom of COVID-19” and any unvaccinated student who has been in close contact with that student. Close contact means being within 3 feet of a person for 15 minutes during a 24-hour period or within 6 feet “while eating or outdoors” for 15 minutes.
On Aug. 18, Gayles announced suddenly that he was resigning. Then, two weeks later, the county school board unexpectedly announced Gayles’s new quarantine rules.
Gayles pointed out that the single-symptom trigger was taken from state guidelines, whereas the county added the mandatory quarantine for all close contacts of the single symptom, which is what resulted in a vast majority of the 1,000 or so quarantines.
